The Bantu–Romance Connection

The Bantu–Romance Connection PDF Author: Cécile de Cat
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027290679
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 378

Get Book Here

Book Description
This landmark volume is the first work specifically designed to explore the extent to which striking surface morpho-syntactic similarities between Bantu and Romance languages actually represent similar syntactic structures. In particular, it explores the timely and much debated issues of verbal morphology and agreement, the structure of DPs, and word order/information structure, with the goal of providing a better understanding of the structure of the different languages investigated, and the implications this holds for syntactic theory more generally. All of the papers draw on data from both Bantu and Romance languages, providing a framework for much-needed further comparative research on the nature of linguistic structure, its diversity and constraints, and the implications this has for learnability/acquisition. The volume also provides an important precedent for incorporating insights from Bantu linguistic structure into mainstream of syntax research.

The Bantu–Romance Connection

The Bantu–Romance Connection PDF Author: Cécile de Cat
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027290679
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 378

Get Book Here

Book Description
This landmark volume is the first work specifically designed to explore the extent to which striking surface morpho-syntactic similarities between Bantu and Romance languages actually represent similar syntactic structures. In particular, it explores the timely and much debated issues of verbal morphology and agreement, the structure of DPs, and word order/information structure, with the goal of providing a better understanding of the structure of the different languages investigated, and the implications this holds for syntactic theory more generally. All of the papers draw on data from both Bantu and Romance languages, providing a framework for much-needed further comparative research on the nature of linguistic structure, its diversity and constraints, and the implications this has for learnability/acquisition. The volume also provides an important precedent for incorporating insights from Bantu linguistic structure into mainstream of syntax research.

Pronouns and Clitics in Early Language

Pronouns and Clitics in Early Language PDF Author: Pilar Larranaga
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110238810
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Get Book Here

Book Description
Traditional grammars have stated that clitics are subject or object pronouns whose distributional features make them different from personal pronouns. This book focuses on the acquisition of personal and demonstrative pronouns as well as clitics with respect to determinative phrases in a variety of languages of the Romance family and several indigenous languages, such as Quechua. A particularly original aspect of the present volume is that it not only addresses syntactic issues, but also semantic and pragmatic questions that have been widely neglected in the literature. It also reports on acquisition data of languages, such as Quechua, which have not attracted the attention of researchers until very recently.

The Determinant Phrase in the Spanish Interlanguage of Native Speakers of Swahili

The Determinant Phrase in the Spanish Interlanguage of Native Speakers of Swahili PDF Author: Maria Landa Buil
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443861049
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 229

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book makes a significant contribution to the Second Language Acquisition research field as it is the only study that exists on the acquisition of the Spanish Determiner Phrase (DP) by speakers of a Bantu language. The corpus was compiled using data from 14 interviews carried out over a 25-month period. The subjects of the study were four Swahili speakers learning Spanish as a third language (English is their L2) at the State University of Zanzibar, Tanzania. The data collected longitudinally was used to characterize the DP of the Swahili-Spanish IL and observe Bantu transfer. This study also represents an important contribution to the discussion on Creole formation since it provides valuable information on the role played by adult speakers in the formation of Creole languages. In this book, the features of the DP in the IL are compared with those of the DP found in three Spanish-lexifier Creoles: Palenquero, Chabacano and Papiamento. Although similar work has been done comparing the interlanguage of learners of English and French with Creoles that have these languages as lexifiers, no comparative studies of this type have been conducted for Spanish. Moreover, in the case of Palenquero, this study also represents the first of its kind to examine languages in which the substrate and the L1 involved belong to the same family of Bantu languages.

Constructing Feminine to Mean

Constructing Feminine to Mean PDF Author: Abdelkader Fassi Fehri
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498574564
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Get Book Here

Book Description
Linguistic gender is a complex and amazing category that has puzzled and still puzzles theoretical linguists, typologists, philosophers, cognitive scientists, didacticians, as well as scholars of anthropology, culture, and even mystical (divine) sufism. In Standard and colloquial Arabic varieties, feminine morphology (unlike “common sense”) is not dedicated to mark beings of the female sex (or “natural gender”). When you name the female of a “lion” (ʔasad) or a “donkey” (ḥimaar), you use different words (labuʔat or ʔataan), as if the male and female of the same species are linguistically conceived as completely unrelated entities. When you “feminize” words like “bee” (naḥl) or “pigeon” (ḥamaam), the outcome is not a noun for the animal with a different sex, but a singular of the collective “bees,” “one bee” (naḥl-at), or an individual pigeon (ḥamaam-at). In the opposite direction, when a singular noun “carpenter” (najjar) is feminized, the (unexpected) result is a special plural, or rather a group, “carpenters as a professional group” (najjar-at). Since some of these words (contrastively) possess “normal” masculine plurals, or masculine singulars, I propose to distinguish atomicities (which are broadly “masculine”) from unities (which are “feminine”). The diversity of feminine senses is also manifested when you feminize an inherently masculine noun like “father” (ʔab), “uncle” (ʕamm), etc. The outcome (in the appropriate performative context) is that you are endearing your father or uncle, rather than “womanizing” him. More “unorthodox” senses are evaluative, pejorative, diminutive, augmentative, etc. It is striking that gender not only plays a central role in shaping individuation, or perspectizing plurality, but it is also used to distinguish what we count, or what we quantifier over. In Arabic, when you count numbers in sequence (three, four, five, six, etc.), you use the feminine, but when you count objects, you have to “negotiate” for gender, due to the “gender polarity” constraint. Your quantifier senses, which are also subtly built in the grammar, equally negotiate for gender. Wide cross-linguistic comparison extends the inventories of features, mechanisms, and typological notions used, to languages like Hebrew, Berber, Celtic, Germanic, Romance, Amazonian, etc. On the whole, gender is far from being parasitic in the grammar of Arabic or any language (including “classifier” languages). It is central as it has never been.

Beyond Functional Sequence

Beyond Functional Sequence PDF Author: Ur Shlonsky
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190266325
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Get Book Here

Book Description
Cartography is a research program within syntactic theory that studies the syntactic structures of a particular language in order to better understand the semantic issues at play in that language. The approach arranges a language's morpho-syntactic features in a rigid universal hierarchy, and its research agenda is to describe this hierarchy -- that is, to draw maps of syntactic configurations. Current work in cartography is both empirical -- extending the approach to new languages and new structures -- and theoretical. The 16 articles in this collection will advance both dimensions. They arise from presentations made at the Syntactic Cartography: Where do we go from here? colloquium held at the University of Geneva in June of 2012 and address three questions at the core of research in syntactic cartography: 1. Where do the contents of functional structure come from? 2. What explains the particular order or hierarchy in which they appear? 3. What are the computational restrictions on the activation of functional categories? Grouped thematically into four sections, the articles address these questions through comparative studies across various languages, such as Italian, Old Italian, Hungarian, English, Jamaican Creole, Japanese, and Chinese, among others.

Locality Domains in the Spanish Determiner Phrase

Locality Domains in the Spanish Determiner Phrase PDF Author: M. Emma Ticio
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 904813398X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book Here

Book Description
Examining its subject from a generative perspective, this highly detailed text deals with the syntax of nominal expressions. It focuses on empirical data taken from the Spanish language, though the author goes further to draw conclusions of wider theoretical interest from material culled from other languages too. The book considers crucial phenomena in the nominal domain, such as extraction out of nominal phrases and ellipsis in these phrases, as well as their modification. In doing so it provides the reader with a unified explanation of a number of phenomena that have not previously been analyzed under a single basic account. In particular, Ticio explores how economy notions interact with a number of functional categories, with the length and type of movements allowed, and with the existence of three internal domains within nominal expressions. She uses these observations to inform her analysis of the structure of arguments and adjuncts in nominal expressions, and of the potential these elements have for extraction. To test the empirical adequacy of her analysis, she employs phenomena such as the properties of attributive adjectives, partial cliticization and nominal elision in Spanish nominal phrases.

Merging Features

Merging Features PDF Author: José M. Brucart
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191564699
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 390

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book presents new work on how Merge and formal features, two basic factors in the Minimalist Program, should determine the syntactic computation of natural language. Merge combines simpler objects into more complex ones. Formal features establish dependencies within objects. In this book leading scholars examine the intricate ways in which these two factors interact to generate well-formed derivations in natural language. It is divided into two parts concerned with formal features and interpretable features - a subset of formal features. The authors combine grammatical theory with the analysis of data drawn from a wide range of languages, both in the adult grammar and in first language acquisition. The mechanisms at work in linguistic computation are considered in relation to a variety of linguistic phenomena, including A-binding, A'-dependencies and reconstruction, agreement, word order, adjuncts, pronouns and complementizers.

Linguists of Tomorrow

Linguists of Tomorrow PDF Author: Kleanthes K. Grohmann
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443839426
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume is a selection of papers presented at “Linguists of Tomorrow”, the 1st Cyprus Postgraduate Conference in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, held at the University of Cyprus on 7–8 May 2010. The collection includes nine chapters by postgraduate students of linguistics as well as two illustrious keynote papers by Prof. Barbara Lust and Prof. Thomas McFadden. The topics range from theoretical linguistics (syntax, semantics, morphology, and phonology) to psycholinguistics (first and second language acquisition, language impairments, and language processing) and applied linguistics (bilingualism, dictionaries, writing, and ethnolinguistics). As such, this collection of papers by established as well as up-and-coming researchers will appeal to a wide range of scholars, students and academics alike, interested in current issues in linguistics.

The Morphosyntax of Albanian and Aromanian Varieties

The Morphosyntax of Albanian and Aromanian Varieties PDF Author: M. Rita Manzini
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501505068
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 348

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book deals with Albanian, including the dialects spoken in Southern Italy, and with the Aromanian spoken in Southern Albania. These languages are set in the context of current generative research on syntax, morphology, language variation and contact – yielding insights into key morphosyntactic notions of case, agreement, complementation, and into phenomena such as Differential Object Marking, the Person Case Constraint, linkers and control.

Linguistic Variation: Structure and Interpretation

Linguistic Variation: Structure and Interpretation PDF Author: Ludovico Franco
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501505106
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 920

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this volume scholars honor M. Rita Manzini for her contributions to the field of Generative Morphosyntax. The essays in this book celebrate her career by continuing to explore inter-area research in linguistics and by pursuing a broad comparative approach, investigating and comparing different languages and dialects.