Isogloss. Open Journal of Romance Linguistics

Not all complementisers are late

Núria Bosch — 2023-08-27

This paper analyses the emergence of illocutionary complementisers (in the sense of Corr 2016, 2022) through a corpus study with Catalan and Spanish children. The production of illocutionary complementisers by ten Catalan- and Spanish-speaking children in the CHILDES database is quantified and compared to the production of finite embedding complementisers. The results indicate that illocutionary complementisers emerge early in the child production data, often well before embedding complementisers first appear. These preliminary findings, which illustrate important developmental differences between kinds of complementisers, are hard to account for in approaches that take functional categories to mature bottom-up, with left-peripheral knowledge developing last. I argue, instead, that the early emergence of illocutionary complementisers favours a view which takes the C-domain to be present early on in child grammars. I finish by considering the development of Italo-Romance complementisers as a future direction, suggesting that a deeper analysis of child ‘errors’ or input-divergent utterances may provide significant insights into the theoretical questions presented, as much as grammatical ones.

Towards a unified analysis of past and future tenses

Luís Filipe Cunha — 2023-08-27

While the literature has often highlighted the differences between the defining features of past and future tenses, little attention has been paid to the similarities that bring these linguistic forms together. Taking European Portuguese data as a point of departure, it was my goal in this paper to investigate some of the correspondences that arise between these structures. So, I will endorse the idea that, in both the past and the future domains, there are equivalent strategies to perform temporal location. Thus, tenses, such as the Pretérito Imperfeito do Indicativo (Imp) in the past or the Futuro Simples (FS) in the future, which do not display relevant temporal constraints beyond the mere location of an eventuality in an interval before or after t0, interact with and are more easily influenced by other semantic categories, namely aspect and modality. On the contrary, tenses that require more evident temporal restrictions, in particular the imposition of final or initial boundaries to the situations with which they are combined, such as the Pretérito Perfeito Simples (PPerf) or the construction ir (‘go’) + Infinitive, have in common that they are less permeable to the influence of other external factors, with temporal location being their most prominent meaning.

A variationist corpus analysis of the definite article with personal names across three varieties of Spanish

Robin Tieperman — 2023-08-12

It has been shown that the presence of a definite article (DA) prior to a personal name (PN) varies not only across languages, but also across varieties of the same language. Spanish is an example of a language that demonstrates DA+PN variation across varieties. However, few studies have quantitatively analyzed this DA+PN variation. The current study examined which linguistic and social factors govern the variation of DA+PN in the speech (sociolinguistic interviews) of 54 speakers from Santiago (Chile), Mexico City, and Granada (Spain) from the online PRESEEA Corpus. Statistical analyses found that the DA+PN realizations are most favored by speakers from Santiago across all educational levels. Speakers from Santiago also favor DA+PN realizations more with female names than male names, demonstrating a gendering of language. Speakers from Mexico City and Granada demonstrated few overall DA+PN realizations, with the least realizations among those with more educational attainment, possibly indicating the effect of a standard language ideology for these communities with regard to DA+PN. Thus, not only do these varieties differ in overall frequency in which DA+PN appears to be the norm in Santiago and much less common in Granada and Mexico City, they also differ in terms of which social factors govern DA+PN realizations in each variety.

The pronominal system of Saint-Pierre-le-Bost

Noam FAUST — 2023-08-12

This paper identifies several phonological and morphological issues raised by the pronominal system of the variety of Saint-Pierre-le-Bost of the French “linguistic Croissant”. An account is proposed within Strict CV (Lowenstamm 1996, Scheer 2004).

Brazilian Venetan is going leísta

Alberto Frasson — 2023-06-15

This paper discusses language variation in heritage languages, focussing on a peculiar use of the dative clitic ghe in Brazilian Venetan, a heritage northern Italo-Romance variety. Corpus data and grammaticality judgments by native speakers showed that, unlike homeland varieties of Venetan, the clitic is used in doubling constructions with both indirect and direct objects. Conversely, accusative clitics do not appear in doubling constructions in Brazilian Venetan, but are limited to cases of resumption of dislocated constituents. This phenomenon is compared to a parallel use of dative clitics with direct objects in some previously described leísta varieties of Spanish. I will show that the type of variation attested in Brazilian Venetan accusative and dative clitics depends on different conditions on cliticisation of the two elements. Specifically, while accusative clitics are pronouns that undergo a morphological process of incorporation, dative clitics are merged as agreement markers on the finite verb. The analysis also captures a diachronic change in the distribution of dative clitics in the diachrony of Venetan.

Activation levels

Lena Baunaz — 2023-05-30

In the last five decades, French wh in-situ has been the center of much work in theoretical linguistics. Nonetheless, scholars still disagree on the distribution of these constructions, and on their interpretation. While whether or not wh in-situ is necessarily presuppositional has been debated for years (Cheng & Rooryck 2000, Baunaz 2011, Shlonsky 2012, a.o.), we believe this question is too narrow. Here, we investigate the ESLO 1-2 corpora of spoken French and provide a fresh understanding of in-situ questions based on the notion of ‘discourse activation’ (Dryer 1996, Larrivée 2019a, Garassino 2022). By demonstrating both the passage from a predominantly ex-situ system to a predominantly in-situ system, and a significant augmentation of non-context-bound in-situ occurrences, we redefine the conditions under which these structures are licenced in Hexagonal French, and how they have evolved from a micro-diachronic perspective (1970s-2010s).

LexSIC

Tanja Kupisch — 2023-05-17

It has been increasingly acknowledged that regional languages and dialects bear similarities with heritage languages, and that some heritage speakers are bilectal with two closely related minority languages or dialects. However, assessing the knowledge of non-standard varieties proves difficult due to the lack of assessment materials. Our contribution documents the creation and validation of LexSIC, a yes/no vocabulary task, a placement test for speakers with receptive and/or productive skills in Sicilian. The materials are freely available. The vocabulary items were validated in a survey with 100 speakers of Italian, who had varying levels of proficiency in Sicilian, including bilectal heritage speakers in Germany. We have relied on Classical Test Theory (CTT) and Item Response Theory (IRT) in validating test items and we demonstrate and discuss correlations with self-reported measures of proficiency, language use, age and education. A comparison of vocabulary proficiency in bilectals with Italian and Sicilian proficiency further shows that the two are highly correlated, which underlines a cumulative enhancement of vocabulary proficiency in bilectals. We discuss the challenges in creating assessment materials in minority languages and dialects.

Imperatives and their interaction with VP-ellipsis in Spanish

María Florencia Silva — 2023-05-17

In this squib, I focus on the interaction between imperative formation and head stranding ellipsis in Spanish, with the aim of reassessing Martins’ (1994) generalization that head movement from V to the polarity-encoding head Σ is a necessary condition for licensing predicate ellipsis. The author argues that Spanish affirmative imperatives, derived by head movement to Σ, behave as predicted by the theory, giving rise to a particular instance of verb stranding ellipsis. In this paper, I show that Spanish does not have the type of ellipsis she predicts in affirmative imperatives. Putative examples of V-stranding XP-ellipsis in the relevant environments are analyzed here as involving some sort of exophoric null object, consistent with Masullo’s (2017) account. Thus, Spanish contrasts sharply with Portuguese, a language which does feature this variety of ellipsis. Consequently, there are important implications for the morphosyntax of Spanish imperatives, the licensing of ellipsis and, more broadly, the theory of head movement.

Diachronic change and variation in use

Esther Rinke — 2023-03-23

Previous studies have demonstrated that in spontaneous speech, Rioplatense Spanish speakers—in contrast to speakers of Peninsular Spanish—sometimes produce clitic-doubled accusative nominal objects. If this contrast between varieties reflects different grammatical systems, it would be expected to also affect the acceptability of clitic doubling across varieties. We tested this hypothesis in a judgment study that compared the acceptability of dative and accusative clitic-doubled objects between Rioplatense and Peninsular Spanish speakers. Speakers of both varieties showed similar preferences with dative clitic doubling, consistent with previous work. By contrast, accusative clitic doubling was highly acceptable in Rioplatense Spanish, but not in Peninsular Spanish. Based on accounts of the diachronic development of clitic doubling, we argue that the Rioplatense speakers exhibit a diachronically advanced behavior compared to Peninsular Spanish speakers.

Francoprovençal: a spatial analysis of ‘partitive articles’ and potential correlates in Swiss and Italian varieties

Tabea Ihsane — 2023-03-23

In this paper, we focus on partitive articles (PAs), i.e., determiners which, generally, have an indefinite interpretation, and on one of their potential correlates, i.e., invariable de, in Francoprovençal, a non-standardized, highly endangered Gallo-Romance language (cf. Zulato, Kasstan & Nagy 2018), and show the fine-grained spatial distribution of these elements in the Swiss and Aosta Valley (Italy) varieties. Presenting several maps based on fieldwork data from Valais (Switzerland) and the Aosta Valley (Italy), we demonstrate that the spatial distribution of PAs and de is more complex than reported in the literature: we complement the basic subdivision of Francoprovençal into two types, Francoprovençal A and B (cf. Kristol 2014, 2016), with a more nuanced picture, in which the morphosyntactic features of PAs play a crucial role: in Francoprovençal A, the presence of PAs depends on the syntactic context whereas, in Francoprovençal B, their presence is limited mainly to two areas, in which singular and plural PAs do not occur together (one area only has singular PAs whereas the other one only has plural PAs). We also show that there is no correlation between phonologically overt plural marking on nouns and absence of PAs; however, we found a correlation between overt sigmatic number marking on nouns and absence of PAs.

A Classless Analysis of Italian Nouns and their Theme-Vowel Alternations

Nicola Lampitelli — 2023-02-06

The decompositional, non-lexicalist, approach to word-structure and the theory of roots have proven highly rewarding. One grey area, however, comes from Romance since, rather than roots, the word structure primitive appears to be the stem: root + ‘stem-formative/theme vowel’. Regardless, there have been perspicacious decompositional accounts of Italian, however these are still marred by the large number of morphological/item-specific irregularities, motivating arbitrary noun classes. Additionally, there are roots that do not inflect: consonant-final and vowel-final forms when these are oxytonic or loanwords. Given these irregularities, previous analyses in Italian have included the use of lexical exceptions and class features. We challenge the use of class features in generating the attested patterns (and their exceptions). Instead, we propose a new categorisation of root-shapes, which, when combined with the exponents of nominal inflection, produce the correct surface pairings, as well as the non-alternating forms. In our analysis, there is no diacritic or special marking of lexical exceptions, all forms inflect regularly in accordance to their phonological shape. This requires the innovation of one new mechanism (Inhibition), but we back it up by showing that it leads to an unexpected beneficial prediction that solves a long-standing problem associated with Raddoppiamento Sintattico (RS).

Comprehension of double-center embedded relatives in Italian: a case for hierarchical intervention

Marco Sala — 2023-01-24

Object relatives are more difficult to process than subject relatives. Several sentence processing models have been proposed to explain this difference. As double-center embedding relatives contain several long-distance dependencies, they are an ideal configuration to compare sentence processing models. The main aim of the present study was to compare the predictions of the featural Relativized Minimality approach with the ones of other relevant sentence processing models.

57 Italian-speaking healthy adults answered comprehension questions concerning the first, second, or third verb to appear in both double-center embedding and control sentences. Results show that questions concerning the matrix verb of double-center embedding structures were significantly easier and were associated with faster response times than questions concerning the embedded verbs. Furthermore, in object double-center embedding relatives the questions concerning the verb of the most embedded clause were easier than the ones concerning the verb of the intermediate embedded clause.

This pattern of results is consistent with featural Relativized Minimality but cannot be fully explained by other sentence processing models.