Pilar Chamorro - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Pilar Chamorro
From Brazilian Literary Tradition to Cyberpaths: The Voice of Indigenous Peoples
In this paper, we present a brief overview about the indigenous literature of Romanticism in Braz... more In this paper, we present a brief overview about the indigenous literature of Romanticism in Brazil. We defend the thesis that the contradictions of this period were inescapable and generated as specificities of that literary moment. In this connection, we hypothesize that the production of scientific articles, the collection of narratives, as well as their availability in cyberpaths are ways of contributing to the preservation, documentation, and linguistic and literary revitalization of indigenous cultures. Therefore, we reproduce the legend A Criacao da Noite ( The Creation of the Night) by Duarte et al. (2018) in Tenetehara, Portuguese and English. We selected this story for the present paper because we defend here that the important advances in the preservation of traditional indigenous cultures use metalinguistic systems of documentation and dissemination alien to these cultures. Furthermore, such advances are necessary to grant a voice to the indigenous people through their o...
Tanto las gramáticas tradicionales (Bello 1984) como los diccionarios de la RAE y de María Moline... more Tanto las gramáticas tradicionales (Bello 1984) como los diccionarios de la RAE y de María Moliner definen la partícula ni como conjunción coordinante o conector que une al menos dos elementos en el discurso, y que a veces se coordina con otra partícula negativa distinta (no). El DRAE (1992) además apunta que cuando ni encabeza una oración sin relacionarla con otra o cuando expresa una relación distinta de la copulativa negativa <<y no>>, equivale a ni siquiera formando frases que expresan el extremo a que puede llegarse en algo. Otros autores han tratado las partículas ni y ni siquiera desde diferentes marcos teóricos. José Portolés (2004) realiza un estudio de los adverbios incluso, hasta y ni siquiera definiéndolos como adverbios de foco escalar. Según este autor dichos adverbios focalizan los constituyentes que modifican y se contrastan éstos con una alternativa que no necesariamente se encuentra explícita, (ej.: Alicia ni siquiera sabe multiplicar). Bosque (1980) me...
Quantification in Malayalam
After presenting some basic genetic, historical and typological information about Malayalam, this... more After presenting some basic genetic, historical and typological information about Malayalam, this chapter outlines the quantification patterns it expresses. It illustrates various semantic types of quantifiers, such as generalized existential, generalized universal, proportional, definite and partitive which are defined in the Quantifier Questionnaire in Chap. “The Quantifier Questionnaire”. It partitions the expression of the semantic types into morpho-syntactic classes: Adverbial type quantifiers and Nominal (or Determiner) type quantifiers. For the various semantic and morpho-syntactic types of quantifiers it also distinguishes syntactically simple and syntactically complex quantifiers, as well as issues of distributivity and scope interaction, classifiers and measure expressions, and existential constructions. The chapter describes structural properties of determiners and quantified noun phrases in Malayalam, both in terms of internal structure (morphological or syntactic) and d...
Building a bridge between linguistic communities of the Old and the New World, 2012
Past Temporal Reference and Remoteness Distinctions in Guajajára
International Journal of American Linguistics, 2020
Based on original fieldwork, in this paper I explore and present a formal semantic analysis of pa... more Based on original fieldwork, in this paper I explore and present a formal semantic analysis of past temporal reference in Guajajára, a variety of Tenetehára, a Tupí-Guaraní language of Brazil. I examine the empirical behavior and semantic contribution of the morphemes ra’a and ri’i and analyze them as past remoteness morphemes that encode both past and remoteness distinctions. I argue that, like tenses in English, they carry presuppositions about the location of topic times relative to evaluation times and propose an analysis as pronominal/referential past tenses (Partee 1973). Crucially, based on their behavior in certain contexts, I claim that these morphemes form a paradigm to which the principle of Maximize Presupposition applies, patterning similar to the remoteness morphemes in Gĩkũyũ (Cable 2013). This study of past temporal interpretation in Guajajára contributes to the increasing research on graded tense systems and more generally to cross-linguistic variation of temporal interpretation.
On the semantic properties of mass and count nouns in Guajajára (Tenetehára)
Linguistic Variation, 2020
In this paper we show that Guajajára has grammaticalized the distinction between mass and count n... more In this paper we show that Guajajára has grammaticalized the distinction between mass and count nouns, but that the coding of this distinction is different from the systems of coding in classifier languages, number-marking languages, and number-neutral languages (Chierchia 1998a, 1998b, 2010; Wilhelm 2008). As a result, we conclude that Guajajára presents a challenge to the tripartite classification of languages proposed in Chierchia’s work, since Guajajára number marking is non-inflectional and optional when plural is already expressed by other quantificational expressions. Furthermore, in Guajajára notional mass nouns can pluralize and directly combine with numerals without the mediation of container or measure constructions in contexts where conventional and non-conventional container and units of measurement are implied. This last observation suggests that coercion is not a mechanism that operates in this language.
Phonetica, 2015
Aims: This study investigates the perception and production of the Galician mid vowel contrasts b... more Aims: This study investigates the perception and production of the Galician mid vowel contrasts by 54 early Spanish-Galician bilinguals in the cities of Vigo and Santiago (Galicia, Spain). Empirical data is provided to examine the role of language dominance in the perception and production of Galician mid vowel contrasts in order to determine whether the Galician vowel system is becoming more Spanish-like as a result of extensive contact with Spanish in urban areas. Methods: Perception and production data for each mid vowel contrast were collected in (1) binary forced-choice identification tasks, (2) AX discrimination tasks and (3) a reading-aloud task. Results: Results from binary forced-choice identification and AX discrimination tasks indicate that Spanish-dominant bilinguals have great difficulty in discriminating between these mid vowels while Galician-dominant subjects display a robust categorical identification of the two mid vowel categories. Acoustic analyses of their produ...
This study reexamines the semantics of the Portuguese Present Perfect and proposes an analysis of... more This study reexamines the semantics of the Portuguese Present Perfect and proposes an analysis of this periphrastic past that does not appeal to type-shifting coercion mechanisms. Aspectual coercion was claimed to explain purported mismatches between selection restrictions of the Portuguese Present tense and the aspectual properties of the Perfect (Schmitt 2001). The present study proposes a truth-conditional compositional analysis of sentences with the Portuguese Present Perfect in which the lexical meaning of the auxiliary ter 'have' combined with the meaning of the Present Indicative tense (ter+PresInd) contribute a universal quantifier whose domain is the topic time interval.
This paper contributes to cross-linguistic studies of TMA systems by examining how Chamorro (an A... more This paper contributes to cross-linguistic studies of TMA systems by examining how Chamorro (an Austronesian language spoken in the Northern Mariana Islands and Guam) conveys temporal distinctions and showing that it is a true tenseless language. The paper focuses on the preverbal marker para, claimed to be a future tense by some scholars but an irrealis marker by others, and offers empirical evidence for its characterization as an irrealis modal marker on the assumption that irrealis modality is defined in terms of event realization at Topic Time. Thus, clauses marked with irrealis morphology do not entail event realization at Topic Time.
Tanto las gramáticas tradicionales (Bello 1984) como los diccionarios de la RAE y de María Moline... more Tanto las gramáticas tradicionales (Bello 1984) como los diccionarios de la RAE y de María Moliner definen la partícula ni como conjunción coordinante o conector que une al menos dos elementos en el discurso, y que a veces se coordina con otra partícula negativa distinta (no). El DRAE (1992) además apunta que cuando ni encabeza una oración sin relacionarla con otra o cuando expresa una relación distinta de la copulativa negativa <>, equivale a ni siquiera formando frases que expresan el extremo a que puede llegarse en algo. Otros autores han tratado las partículas ni y ni siquiera desde diferentes marcos teóricos. José Portolés (2004) realiza un estudio de los adverbios incluso, hasta y ni siquiera definiéndolos como adverbios de foco escalar. Según este autor dichos adverbios focalizan los constituyentes que modifican y se contrastan éstos con una alternativa que no necesariamente se encuentra explícita, (ej.: Alicia ni siquiera sabe multiplicar). Bosque (1980) menciona el carácter escalar de las partículas incluso y ni siquiera afirmando que se encuentran en el extremo de una escala de probabilidad. Martí Sánchez (1998) presenta un ni modal que niega el elemento que menos se espera sea negado, que además es equivalente a ni siquiera en determinados contextos. A este ni modal lo considera como el contrapunto de la partícula adverbial hasta en su carácter escalar.
From Brazilian Literary Tradition to Cyberpaths: The Voice of Indigenous Peoples
In this paper, we present a brief overview about the indigenous literature of Romanticism in Braz... more In this paper, we present a brief overview about the indigenous literature of Romanticism in Brazil. We defend the thesis that the contradictions of this period were inescapable and generated as specificities of that literary moment. In this connection, we hypothesize that the production of scientific articles, the collection of narratives, as well as their availability in cyberpaths are ways of contributing to the preservation, documentation, and linguistic and literary revitalization of indigenous cultures. Therefore, we reproduce the legend A Criacao da Noite ( The Creation of the Night) by Duarte et al. (2018) in Tenetehara, Portuguese and English. We selected this story for the present paper because we defend here that the important advances in the preservation of traditional indigenous cultures use metalinguistic systems of documentation and dissemination alien to these cultures. Furthermore, such advances are necessary to grant a voice to the indigenous people through their o...
Tanto las gramáticas tradicionales (Bello 1984) como los diccionarios de la RAE y de María Moline... more Tanto las gramáticas tradicionales (Bello 1984) como los diccionarios de la RAE y de María Moliner definen la partícula ni como conjunción coordinante o conector que une al menos dos elementos en el discurso, y que a veces se coordina con otra partícula negativa distinta (no). El DRAE (1992) además apunta que cuando ni encabeza una oración sin relacionarla con otra o cuando expresa una relación distinta de la copulativa negativa <<y no>>, equivale a ni siquiera formando frases que expresan el extremo a que puede llegarse en algo. Otros autores han tratado las partículas ni y ni siquiera desde diferentes marcos teóricos. José Portolés (2004) realiza un estudio de los adverbios incluso, hasta y ni siquiera definiéndolos como adverbios de foco escalar. Según este autor dichos adverbios focalizan los constituyentes que modifican y se contrastan éstos con una alternativa que no necesariamente se encuentra explícita, (ej.: Alicia ni siquiera sabe multiplicar). Bosque (1980) me...
Quantification in Malayalam
After presenting some basic genetic, historical and typological information about Malayalam, this... more After presenting some basic genetic, historical and typological information about Malayalam, this chapter outlines the quantification patterns it expresses. It illustrates various semantic types of quantifiers, such as generalized existential, generalized universal, proportional, definite and partitive which are defined in the Quantifier Questionnaire in Chap. “The Quantifier Questionnaire”. It partitions the expression of the semantic types into morpho-syntactic classes: Adverbial type quantifiers and Nominal (or Determiner) type quantifiers. For the various semantic and morpho-syntactic types of quantifiers it also distinguishes syntactically simple and syntactically complex quantifiers, as well as issues of distributivity and scope interaction, classifiers and measure expressions, and existential constructions. The chapter describes structural properties of determiners and quantified noun phrases in Malayalam, both in terms of internal structure (morphological or syntactic) and d...
Building a bridge between linguistic communities of the Old and the New World, 2012
Past Temporal Reference and Remoteness Distinctions in Guajajára
International Journal of American Linguistics, 2020
Based on original fieldwork, in this paper I explore and present a formal semantic analysis of pa... more Based on original fieldwork, in this paper I explore and present a formal semantic analysis of past temporal reference in Guajajára, a variety of Tenetehára, a Tupí-Guaraní language of Brazil. I examine the empirical behavior and semantic contribution of the morphemes ra’a and ri’i and analyze them as past remoteness morphemes that encode both past and remoteness distinctions. I argue that, like tenses in English, they carry presuppositions about the location of topic times relative to evaluation times and propose an analysis as pronominal/referential past tenses (Partee 1973). Crucially, based on their behavior in certain contexts, I claim that these morphemes form a paradigm to which the principle of Maximize Presupposition applies, patterning similar to the remoteness morphemes in Gĩkũyũ (Cable 2013). This study of past temporal interpretation in Guajajára contributes to the increasing research on graded tense systems and more generally to cross-linguistic variation of temporal interpretation.
On the semantic properties of mass and count nouns in Guajajára (Tenetehára)
Linguistic Variation, 2020
In this paper we show that Guajajára has grammaticalized the distinction between mass and count n... more In this paper we show that Guajajára has grammaticalized the distinction between mass and count nouns, but that the coding of this distinction is different from the systems of coding in classifier languages, number-marking languages, and number-neutral languages (Chierchia 1998a, 1998b, 2010; Wilhelm 2008). As a result, we conclude that Guajajára presents a challenge to the tripartite classification of languages proposed in Chierchia’s work, since Guajajára number marking is non-inflectional and optional when plural is already expressed by other quantificational expressions. Furthermore, in Guajajára notional mass nouns can pluralize and directly combine with numerals without the mediation of container or measure constructions in contexts where conventional and non-conventional container and units of measurement are implied. This last observation suggests that coercion is not a mechanism that operates in this language.
Phonetica, 2015
Aims: This study investigates the perception and production of the Galician mid vowel contrasts b... more Aims: This study investigates the perception and production of the Galician mid vowel contrasts by 54 early Spanish-Galician bilinguals in the cities of Vigo and Santiago (Galicia, Spain). Empirical data is provided to examine the role of language dominance in the perception and production of Galician mid vowel contrasts in order to determine whether the Galician vowel system is becoming more Spanish-like as a result of extensive contact with Spanish in urban areas. Methods: Perception and production data for each mid vowel contrast were collected in (1) binary forced-choice identification tasks, (2) AX discrimination tasks and (3) a reading-aloud task. Results: Results from binary forced-choice identification and AX discrimination tasks indicate that Spanish-dominant bilinguals have great difficulty in discriminating between these mid vowels while Galician-dominant subjects display a robust categorical identification of the two mid vowel categories. Acoustic analyses of their produ...
This study reexamines the semantics of the Portuguese Present Perfect and proposes an analysis of... more This study reexamines the semantics of the Portuguese Present Perfect and proposes an analysis of this periphrastic past that does not appeal to type-shifting coercion mechanisms. Aspectual coercion was claimed to explain purported mismatches between selection restrictions of the Portuguese Present tense and the aspectual properties of the Perfect (Schmitt 2001). The present study proposes a truth-conditional compositional analysis of sentences with the Portuguese Present Perfect in which the lexical meaning of the auxiliary ter 'have' combined with the meaning of the Present Indicative tense (ter+PresInd) contribute a universal quantifier whose domain is the topic time interval.
This paper contributes to cross-linguistic studies of TMA systems by examining how Chamorro (an A... more This paper contributes to cross-linguistic studies of TMA systems by examining how Chamorro (an Austronesian language spoken in the Northern Mariana Islands and Guam) conveys temporal distinctions and showing that it is a true tenseless language. The paper focuses on the preverbal marker para, claimed to be a future tense by some scholars but an irrealis marker by others, and offers empirical evidence for its characterization as an irrealis modal marker on the assumption that irrealis modality is defined in terms of event realization at Topic Time. Thus, clauses marked with irrealis morphology do not entail event realization at Topic Time.
Tanto las gramáticas tradicionales (Bello 1984) como los diccionarios de la RAE y de María Moline... more Tanto las gramáticas tradicionales (Bello 1984) como los diccionarios de la RAE y de María Moliner definen la partícula ni como conjunción coordinante o conector que une al menos dos elementos en el discurso, y que a veces se coordina con otra partícula negativa distinta (no). El DRAE (1992) además apunta que cuando ni encabeza una oración sin relacionarla con otra o cuando expresa una relación distinta de la copulativa negativa <>, equivale a ni siquiera formando frases que expresan el extremo a que puede llegarse en algo. Otros autores han tratado las partículas ni y ni siquiera desde diferentes marcos teóricos. José Portolés (2004) realiza un estudio de los adverbios incluso, hasta y ni siquiera definiéndolos como adverbios de foco escalar. Según este autor dichos adverbios focalizan los constituyentes que modifican y se contrastan éstos con una alternativa que no necesariamente se encuentra explícita, (ej.: Alicia ni siquiera sabe multiplicar). Bosque (1980) menciona el carácter escalar de las partículas incluso y ni siquiera afirmando que se encuentran en el extremo de una escala de probabilidad. Martí Sánchez (1998) presenta un ni modal que niega el elemento que menos se espera sea negado, que además es equivalente a ni siquiera en determinados contextos. A este ni modal lo considera como el contrapunto de la partícula adverbial hasta en su carácter escalar.