Isogloss. Open Journal of Romance Linguistics

Compositionality in verbs and nominalizations

Alessandro Boechat de Medeiros — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0200

This work is about verb nominalizations and the relation between these forms, the argument structure of their verbal bases, and verbs’ possible meanings. Since Chomsky’s seminal work (Chomsky, 1970), nominalizations have become a window to investigate fundamental aspects of argument structure and assess linguistic theory. Following such a tradition, adopting the framework of Distributed Morphology (Halle; Marantz, 1993; Marantz, 1997, 2013b) and using Brazilian Portuguese data, this paper explores typical nominal forms derived from various kinds of Brazilian Portuguese verbs to evaluate a specific proposal of constructionist argument structure theory found in Medeiros (2018). The BP data show that syntactic-semantic decompositions of verb phrases are at least partially preserved in their derived nominal forms in a very systematic manner, and that these forms maintain the complex structural meaning in all kinds of situations – even when these are interpreted as result nominals. This work also provides some innovative syntactic-semantic means to deal with result nominals interpreted as entities (as in the case of construção (construction)), showing how to obtain, compositionally, such entity readings, demonstrating that even in these cases there are clear reflexes of event meanings.

The roots and structures of possessive noun classes

Grant Armstrong — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0200

In both the typological literature and literature on formal syntax and semantics, a division is drawn between nouns that are inalienably possessed such as body parts and kinship terms and nouns that are alienably possessed such as owned materials. In this paper I re-examine data from Spanish and Mayan languages and propose an analysis of it that emphasizes two important points regarding the roots and structures associated with inalienable and alienable possession. I first make the novel observation that various types of external possession in Spanish provide clear support for the idea that inalienable possession is structurally less complex than alienable possession: inalienable possessive relations are introduced within a complex n head that consists of a root and nominalizing head. I then explore attributive possession in Mayan languages and highlight data that leads to conflicting conclusions about where, precisely, inalienable relations such as part-of and kin-of are encoded: on n heads or on roots. I outline avenues for future research with the Mayan language family that may help elucidate which of these two analyses may ultimately be correct.

Emphatic affirmative verb reduplication in Spanish

María Florencia Silva — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0200

In this article, I present a type of verb reduplication observed in Rioplatense Spanish that has not yet been discussed in the literature. This type of construction, which I will call emphatic affirmative verb reduplication, is similar to a type of reduplication present in European Portuguese but has specific properties that make it different and it simultaneously motivates an alternative analysis to that proposed in the literature. Here, I provide a comprehensive description of the phenomenon, situating it within the set of other reduplications, and outline a syntactic proposal that captures the main properties of the phenomenon.

What lexical acquisition has to say about a non-lexicalist architecture of grammar – and vice-versa

Rafael Luis Beraldo, Paulo Ângelo Araújo-Adriano — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Distributed Morphology (DM) predicts that the units of syntactic derivation are smaller than words. This paper explores the implications of this prediction for language acquisition research and questions if DM is descriptively and theoretically sound when faced with acquisition phenomena. We first introduce independent evidence supporting sub-word units in acquisition: results from a computational model of lexical acquisition show that slightly more morphologically complex input data, such as Brazilian Portuguese when compared to English, cause a substantial decrease in the model’s performance; children’s early productions when acquiring polysynthetic languages reveal they are attempting to find these languages’ morphological units, instead of relying on chunks of non-analysed material; and words are shown to lack explanatory power in describing language acquisition in terms of storage, bootstrapping, or production. We then bridge the gap between DM and earlier proposals for the identification of words and formal features, briefly outlining a strategy for acquiring morphemes. Finally, we present accounts for two prevalent phenomena linked to language acquisition through the lens of DM: the overregularisation in acquiring irregular verbs, a step observed in children acquiring different languages; and the Brazilian Portuguese verbal paradigm shift, an example of morphological diachronic change. Our findings support the non-lexicalist derivation of words, highlighting that words are incompatible with acquisition from multiple perspectives. This suggests that understanding language acquisition benefits from considering the smaller, morpheme-based units predicted by Distributed Morphology.