Search Results (973)

Western Austronesian languages, like Tagalog, have unique, complex voice systems that require the correct combinations of verbal and nominal markers, raising many questions about their learnability. In this article, we review the experimental and observational studies on both the L1 and L2 acquisition of Tagalog. The reviewed studies reveal error patterns that reflect the complex nature of the Tagalog voice system. The main goal of the article is to present a full picture of commission errors in young Filipino children’s expression of causation and agency in Tagalog by describing patterns of nominal marking and voice marking in L1 Tagalog and L2 Tagalog. It also aims to provide an overview of existing research, as well as characterize research on nominal and verbal acquisition, specifically in terms of research problems, data sources, and methodology. Additionally, we discuss the research gaps in at least fifty years’ worth of studies in the area from the 1960’s to the present, as well as ideas for future research to advance the state of the art. Full article

Studies on the constitution of the Spanish periphrastic system show that there is a great ease with which verbal periphrases admit different lexical items in the second verb slot as they go through their grammaticalization process. However, it has not been sufficiently explored whether the evolution of combinatorial patterns in near-synonymous periphrases follows similar grammaticalization paths. Adopting a constructionist, usage-based approach, we investigate the evolution of the so-called near-synonymous periphrases dejar de + inf and parar de + inf, as in Deja de/Para de gritar, ‘Stop shouting.’ More specifically, we discuss the semantic areas they cover, the functional distribution between the two throughout time, their evolution in terms of collostructional patterns, and their realized and potential productivity, paying special attention to the Aktionsart of the predicates in the Vinf slot. All tokens in the corpus were extracted from CORDE and analyzed in terms of morphosyntactic and semantic-pragmatic parameters, as well as contextual elements. We conduct a distinctive collexeme analysis to investigate which lexemes are strongly attracted or repelled by the Vinf slot in each construction. This analysis shows that the evolution of parar de + inf is not parallel to that of dejar de + inf and that there is a clear distribution of labor between the two constructions. Full article

Research in sociophonetic perception has suggested that linguistic factors influence the social meaning of a particular variant, such that the strength of social meaning appears to be mediated by factors like grammatical category or phonological environment. Here, we further investigate the impact of linguistic factors on the perception of sociolinguistic variables by examining evaluations of /s/ aspiration in the speech of four male Puerto Rican Spanish speakers. We look at how evaluations of this variable pattern based on the phonological context (preconsonantal vs. prevocalic), the proportion of a given variant ([s] or [h]) in the stimuli, and the listener residence (Puerto Rico vs. mainland US). Our results replicate earlier work showing that /s/ realization contributes to status and masculinity ratings. However, we do not find evidence of an effect of incremental changes in the proportions of [s]:[h] variants in an utterance or an effect of listener residence. Critically, we do find that phonological context influences the evaluations of listeners: [s] is rated as less masculine than [h] in preconsonantal environments, but in prevocalic environments, there is no effect of variant. Given that [s] is rarely found in preconsonantal contexts in Puerto Rican Spanish, and even less so in male speech, this result is consistent with studies arguing that social meaning is stronger in marked contexts. Expected patterns for gender, phonological context, and dialect interact to make an [s] realization of preconsonantal /s/ particularly rare in male speech of this variety, which opens the door for more robust socioindexical meaning. Full article

A sketch is offered of a framework that would abandon the familiar notion of a language and the accompanying question of whether it has changed under contact. The framework would focus instead on speakers and on the linguistic consequences of people contact. Speakers in contact settings are not failing or deviating from a language’s norm while attempting to say the same things that are said in non-contact settings; rather, they are succeeding at saying different things. New arrivals face vast differences in the conceptualization of referents between their home precursor setting and the new encounter setting. These differences in conceptualization give rise to large numbers of changes in what speakers say. In most cases, these new things they say are just that, new speech or new messaging with no change in the grammar. But in a minority of cases, the new messaging does have linguistic, that is, grammatical consequences. Changes in the grammars of people in contact thus result not only, and perhaps not primarily, from formal copying or modeling but are responses to new conceptualizations prevailing in the new environment. The distinction between expressions reflecting only new conceptualizations, and those reflecting new conceptualizations and new grammar carries theoretical implications for the way linguists think about the grammars of bilinguals. And it carries applied implications for the way educators think about the linguistic performance of bilingual students, especially in social settings where they are minoritized. Data are drawn from the speech of Latin Americans and their descendants in New York City and other U.S. locales. Full article

Factivity alternations received at least two kinds of explanations in the literature: there are approaches that attribute the two readings to two different LFs and approaches that derive the presence/absence of a factive inference by appealing to general pragmatic mechanisms. In this paper I investigate verbs displaying two different kinds of factivity alternations in Azeri and argue for the former view of how factivity alternations emerge. Full article

In this research paper, based on an acceptability judgment task, it is demonstrated that dual morphology can denote paucity in northern rural Jordanian Arabic (NRJA), asserting on Blanc and Brustad’s observation that some Arabic varieties have pseudo-dual (or unspecified dual), i.e., it may refer to numbers above two. It is shown that the dual morpheme -e:n in this dialect does not only refer to an exact (dual) number, but also to an approximative (paucal) number. This implies that the paucal category, which typically evolves from the plural category in natural languages, may likewise develop from the dual category. On this basis, the paucal is peculiar in Arabic, as it can be derived by (1) plural morphology as in Standard Arabic or (2) dual morphology, as in NRJA. In addition, the paper shows how the morphosyntax of the dual in NRJA yields either dual or paucal reading. Adopting Harbour’s number theory where the components of a number system are predicted by a set of bivalent number features under the number head #⁰, I show that the bivalent feature [±minimal] in the morphosyntax of the dual in NRJA is crucial to derive its two interpretations: [+minimal] yields the exact (dual) reading, whereas [-minimal] yields the approximative (paucal) reading. This analysis is expected to have intralingual usefulness. Specifically, it could be employed to plausibly derive the paucal category that is based on the dual category in other Arabic varieties, as descriptively reported in Blanc and Brustad’s studies. Furthermore, the observation that the dual category is the source of the paucal category has cross-linguistic implications. Particularly, it implies that the paucal category does not necessarily require the plural category to be derived in a language. Additionally, this observation asserts that languages tend to use lower numerals to assign a paucal reading to them, as is the case in French (e.g., deux ou trois). Full article

The romance future and conditional tenses are the result of the grammaticalization of Latin periphrasis, mainly cantāre habeō. In some medieval Romance languages, including Catalan, two types of forms existed: synthetic forms (faré ‘I will do’) and analytical forms (fer-lo he ‘I will do it’). Analytical forms do not present univerbation and are thus less grammaticalized than synthetic forms. The present work aims to study the distribution of synthetic and analytical forms diachronically. A diachronic corpus (11th c.–16th c.) was compiled to serve this purpose. According to the syntactic restrictions of clitic placement, analytical forms could appear in the same syntactic environments than synthetic forms with postverbal pronouns (faré-lo ‘I will do it’). Therefore, only those contexts are analysed to assess the degree of grammaticalization. Some recent works point out that the grammaticalization of future and conditional was more advanced in the eastern languages of the Iberian Peninsula, such as Catalan, than in the western ones. The results from our corpus confirm these differences. In addition, the data show another grammaticalization process: the evolution of clitic placement towards a fixed preverbal position. Full article

Language and culture are intrinsically intertwined, and culture should not be considered as an expendable fifth skill in language teaching. Bilingual programs are expected to be a key element to enhance culture learning and to develop intercultural competence due to the extensive use of the L2. This study aimed at exploring the effects of bilingual programs for the development of the formerly mentioned skills in language learners. It also sought to contrast students’ insights with teachers’ perceptions on the implementation of bilingual programs and their effects on students’ language and culture learning. The sample consisted of 136 students and 35 Spanish teachers. The results should be carefully interpreted as they showed that there is no significant difference between the perception of bilingual and non-bilingual students in their development of intercultural competence and culture learning. Additionally, content teachers usually adhere to narratives of resistance towards CLIL programs. We concluded that the current implementation of bilingual programs should be specifically addressed. In this regard, it is important to focus on teacher training and to foster exchange programs for teachers and students. Moreover, addressing the availability of human and material resources is essential. Full article

The 21st century has witnessed a substantial increase in research focused on the benefits of bilingualism for individuals. The aspects that have received the most attention have been executive functions. And communication skills. Less is known, however, about the noncognitive and nonlinguistic aspects of bilingualism. Personality psychologists claim that personality is the result of a combination of nature-related and nurture-related factors, but the latter have not been sufficiently addressed in studies on bilingualism. Thus, to bridge this gap, the present contribution pursues this line of inquiry by adopting a quantitative approach to the examination of the self-perceived mobility, employability, and intercultural competence of participants who studied in a bilingual education program. A total of 835 respondents living in Brazil completed an online questionnaire. Mann–Whitney U and Wilcoxon W tests showed higher scores for bilingual graduates than for their nonbilingual counterparts on the three subscales. Correlation analyses revealed moderate-to-high positive correlations between bilingual graduates’ perception of their way of being and their way of life on the one hand, and among their self-perceived mobility, employability, and intercultural competence on the other. Likewise, the analyses showed statistically significant positive correlations between being proficient in more than one foreign language and the dimension of mobility. Our findings illustrate the influence that bilingualism/multilingualism exerts on factors that determine everyday life and corroborate and expand the research conducted in this strand. Avenues for further related research are discussed. Full article

Children acquiring a non-negative concord language like English or German have been found to consistently interpret sentences with two negative elements in a negative concord manner as conveying a single semantic negation. Corpus-based investigations for English and German show that children also produce sentences with two negative elements but only a single negation meaning. As any approach to negative concord and negative indefinites needs to account for both the typological variation and the child data, we revisit the three most current syntactic Agree-based analyses, as well as a movement-based approach and show that they either have difficulties with the child data or face challenges in the adult language variation or both. As a consequence, we develop a novel analysis of negative concord and negative indefinites which relies on purely morphological operations applying to hierarchical semantic representations within a version of the Meaning First architecture of grammar. We will argue that the typological variation between the main three different types of languages as well as the children’s non adult-like behaviour fall out from this in a straightforward fashion while the downsides of the Agree- and the movement-based accounts are avoided. Full article

This paper presents a study of actuality entailments in Balkar (a dialect of Karachay-Balkar, Turkic). The study focuses on the deontic and causal meanings of four morphemes: two suffixes (the causative suffix and the suffix -al (‘can/may’)) and two verbs (bujur (‘order’) and qoj (‘allow’)). In the first half of the paper, I provide empirical support for three generalizations: (a) only causal modals can have actuality entailments (all universal and some existential causal modals); (b) actuality entailments arise whenever a causal modal has a telic interpretation, more precisely, when it is not embedded under an imperfective or a delimitative operator (c) existential but not universal causal modals trigger an anti-actuality entailment under negation. In the second half of the paper, I propose a theory of root modality within the framework of situation semantics. In this framework, root modals describe a situation (the anchor situation) and quantify over situations that stand in a particular semantic relation to it. The proposed Causal Modality Theory (CMT) consists of two assumptions: (a) Causal modals quantify over causal chains initiated by the counterparts of the anchor situation. (b) Some existential causal modals have a conditional presupposition: if any counterpart of the anchor situation caused another situation, then the anchor situation itself caused the same situation. The first assumption explains why all universal causal modals have actuality entailments and why existential causal modals trigger an anti-actuality entailment under negation. The second assumption predicts that some existential causal modals (the ones with the conditional presupposition) also trigger an actuality entailment. CMT treats causal modals as bi-eventive predicates, like (non-culminating) accomplishments. They describe two situations: the anchor situation and a situation caused by it. As a result, causal modals are predicted to behave like (non-culminating) accomplishments, namely, they are predicted to trigger actuality entailments if and only if they are not embedded under an imperfective or a delimitative operator. Full article

This paper sets out to investigate the modal uses of the lexeme hɒ³ ‘good’ in the Jidong Shaoxing variety of Wu and to reconstruct its grammaticalization pathway. Modal meanings of hɒ³ include circumstantial possibility, deontic possibility and necessity, and epistemic possibility. These meanings can be summarized as ‘can’, ‘may’, and ‘should’, respectively. The modal meanings of hɒ³ are derived from its meaning of ‘fit to’ rather than ‘good’. We propose here that hɒ³ first extended to express circumstantial possibility, and then further extended to denote deontic modality and participant-internal possibility in two separate directions: (i) circumstantial possibility > deontic modality, and (ii) circumstantial possibility > participant-internal possibility. The epistemic use of hɒ³ is proposed as the final stage of the lexeme’s modal extension. Full article

Six main alternative linkage proposals which involve the Sino-Tibetan family, including Sinitic and other language families of the East Asian area (Miao-Yao, Altaic/Transeurasian, Austroasiatic, Tai-Kadai, Austronesian) are briefly outlined. Using the standard techniques of comparative linguistics, a remote linkage between the Sino-Tibetan languages, including Sinitic, the Yeniseian languages of Siberia, and the Na-Dene languages of northwest North America is demonstrated. This includes cognate core lexicon showing regular sound correspondences, morphological similarities of form and function, as well as similarities in social structure. The other proposals for linkages that connect Sinitic and other languages of the East Asian area appear not to be based on a genetic linguistic relationship but rather due to contact: millennia of loanwords from Sinitic into the languages of those families and some lexicon borrowed into Sinitic. More remains to be done to further document the status of the linkage between Sino-Tibetan and Dene-Yeniseian. Full article

To deepen on the study of the concept of neologicity, an exhaustive review of the literature was carried out. Once the different parameters related to this concept were isolated, we realized that some of them were also used to determine the communicative function of neologisms. For this reason, first, we correlated the objective criteria to classify neologisms as prototypical of the denominative or the stylistic function with the parameters related to the neological quality. Second, we defined new criteria, both linguistic and chronological, to broaden the scope of our analysis. Afterwards, all the criteria were applied to a corpus of neologisms from newspaper articles and journalistic blogs in Spanish written by women and men. The results confirmed that neologisms with stylistic features tend to be more neological than denominative neologisms. Consequently, they are usually less frequent lexical units used in general or informal contexts. In addition, they tend to be the result of unproductive word formation rules that might contain subjective linguistic components and also tend to be more recent. Full article

Films serve to (re-)create a ‘world’ within the mind of the audience. Additionally, they introduce or reinforce stereotypes portrayed as a reality of the modern world through multiplexity and the strategic use of foreign languages, dialects, and non-native language use, among others. Various concepts of stereotypes can be explored in fiction feature films, especially as film characters are often based on different kinds of stereotypes. Audiovisual texts tend to operate as cultural constructs that reflect and convey certain ideologies within an industry that holds the power to marginalize or belittle voices. Multilingual films highlight the contrasts among and within cultures; hence, they can further exacerbate the marginalization and stereotyping of different cultures and nations, ultimately having damaging effects on society’s perception of different stereotypes, such as race and gender groups, which is shown with the examples from a multilingual film. This article analyzes the marginalization and stereotypes in a Hollywoodian multilingual film through film analysis and critical theory. By doing so, this study aims to provide insight into the stereotypes that have been depicted, covering various clichés and stereotypes, including cultural, gender, political, and religious stereotypes. Furthermore, it seeks to dissect the societal consequences that arise from detrimental portrayals of stereotyping in a purposeful selection of an American multilingual film. Full article