Preliminary of the Imperative in the Japreria language (original) (raw)
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«19 The Syntax of Judaeo-Spanish»
Guido MENSCHING & Frank SAVELSBERG (dirs.), Manual of Judaeo-Romace Linguistics and Philology (=Manuals of Romance Linguistics, 31 [Berlin–Boston: De Gruyter]), pp. 507-533, 2023
The syntax of Judaeo-Spanish throughout its history has been highly determined by the different textual traditions cultivated in each epoch. Sephardic texts of the 20th and 21st centuries are not an exception. Therefore, some of the syntactic features that will be described below correspond specifically to certain types of texts still produced (although residually) in the last hundred years of Sephardic literature, whilst others are associated with the (Western-imported) new literary genres cultivated at that time. In this chapter the exposition will be organized according to three different levels of analysis: a) phrases, b) simple sentences, and c) complex sentences. Due to space limitations, the focus will be on those constructions not shared with Modern Standard Spanish, even when the presence of some others in modern Sephardic texts is probably due to a process of re-Hispanicization.
The Handbook of Portuguese Linguistics
2016
OE/LIN/UI0214/2013). We also thanks an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on a previous version of this paper. Cognate Null-Obj: the null object refers to an object easily recovered from the lexical content of the verb: (3) Durante as minhas férias , quero sobretudo ler__. during the my vacation want mainly read 'During my vacation, I mainly want to read.' Arbitrary Null-Obj, where the missing object is understood as part of the lexical meaning of some verbs: (4) Isto leva à seguinte conclusão. this leads to-the following conclusion 'This leads (us/people) to the following conclusion.' Anaphoric Null-Obj: the null object has a linguistic antecedent. (5) Ele experimentou o casaco mas não comprou__. he tried on the coat but not bought 'He tried on the coat but he did not buy (it).' As shown in the examples (1) to (5), Portuguese allows different types of Null_Obj. In this work we will focus on definite anaphoric and situational null objects, i.e., the cases in (2) and (5). VP ellipsis (henceforth,VPE) designates the lack of the phonological expression that includes the verbal complement of a verb or verbal sequence and optionally its adjunct(s). Early analyses on VP ellipsis focused on English. In this language VP ellipsis only occurs with auxiliary verbs, the infinitival marker to and the copulative verb "be": (6) Mary loves Peter and Ann does __, too. (7) Mary wants to buy an encyclopedia and I also want to __. (8) A: Who is the best basketball player in the neighborhood? B: John is __. The study of predicate ellipsis has been extended to other languages, and a different strategy of VP ellipsis has been put forth, where the elliptical VP is licensed by a main verb. Goldberg (2005) called this strategy verb stranding VPE. Raposo (1986) was the first to claim the existence of this strategy in EP. (9) A: A empregada colocou os livros na estante? the housemaid put the books on-the shelf 'Did the housemaid put the books on the shelf?' B: Sim, colocou __. Yes, put Yes, she did. Within the Principles and Parameters framework, VPE analyses mainly focused on the licensing condition(s) on the elliptical constituent and the recovering strategy of ellipsis. We will retain these topics in the study of VPE in EP and BP.
Od Nominalizacija Do Pitanja – Na Primjeru Tukanoanskih Jezika
Jezikoslovlje, 2008
This paper examines question formation in the Tucanoan languages of South America from a comparative and diachronic point of view. We argue that these languages exhibit a historical and semantic relationship between nominalizations and questions. Our hypothesis is primarily based on the formal identity of their markers and on the fact that the interrogative verbal forms resemble nominalizations being formally less finite than their declarative counterparts because they lack the normal subject agreement suffixes. We claim that the interrogative verbal forms originate from nominalized predications used to form an inferential or mirative construction that were upgraded to the status of independent utterances through copula deletion. Semantically, the interrogative meaning must have become conventionalized via stages expressing doubt or surprise.
Clitics are not enough: on agreement and null subjects in Brazilian Venetan.
Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 2021
This paper presents some facts about the syntax of subject pronouns in contact. We investigate agreement and EPP-checking in Brazilian Venetan, a heritage northern Italo-Romance variety spoken in southern Brazil in contact with Brazilian Portuguese. Central Venetan, the northern Italo-Romance variety that constitutes the basis of Brazilian Venetan, is a null-subject language presenting agreement-like subject clitics; Brazilian Portuguese is a partial pro-drop language, in which null subjects are allowed only in precise syntactic conditions and it is developing reduced pronominal subjects. We will address two changes we detected in Brazilian Venetan with respect to the syntax of subject pronouns: the non-contrastive realisation of the first person singular tonic pronoun, and the change in the syntax of subject clitics, which seem to be used as weak pronouns rather than agreement items. We will claim that the first change has to be connected to the simplification of interface conditions between syntax and discourse, a pattern which is commonly attested in bilingual speakers, while the second can be quite safely ascribed to the contact with a partially overlapping structure, namely the reduced pronominal subjects in spoken Brazilian Portuguese. We analyse the two phenomena, trying to find possible links between them in order to develop an analysis of subject clitics in contact and the conditions in which we may most probably find an effect of contact.
This paper presents a functional account of directives in spontaneous conversations in Spanish. More specifically, we address the use of imperatives and free-standing que-clauses with a directive meaning in interactions among equals. We start our analysis from Searle's (1969) Speech Act Theory. The purpose of this paper is to clarify how imperatives and free-standing que-clauses with subjunctive mood function in terms of the range of speech acts and degree of prototypicality within the category of directives. In order to do so, we describe the functional range of both constructions and the syntactic differences among them. It is argued that que-clauses are displaced directives, expressing atypical directivity. We also posit a functional division of labour between prototypical imperatives and free-standing que-clauses with subjunctive mood. The study is based on the analysis of 57 conversations among adolescents from Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile (COLA corpus). COMP PRON fall-PRS.IND.3SG
In the Indo-European languages, where there is the identity of morphological realisation between interrogative and independent relative pronouns, indirect WH questions and independent relatives are in many cases homophonous. Although the two constructions, interrogative and independent relative, are acknowledged in literature as syntactically and semantically different, the evaluation of these subordinates lacks consistency when they depend on a series of semifactive assertive families of predicates. This discordance in the interpretation of the same clause, oscillating between interrogative and independent relative, constitutes, in itself, grounds for analysis. It has consequences not only on the level of descriptive adequacy, but it also seems to have some bearing on the explanatory principles of linguistic theory. In giving an adequate description of indirect WH questions, an appropriate semantic characterisation, verified in a variety of different pragmatic contexts is necessary. A contrastive framework, moreover, evidentiates the relevance of semantics and pragmatics not only in controlling linguistic stipulations, but in capturing wider generalisations and in abstracting properties of language. The question is all the more interesting because syntactic theory, in its mostly influential variants, has been constructed via argumentation which makes minimum use of necessarily pre-theoretic notions about meaning and connected thought.
Interrogative Constructions in Guaraní: Grammatical, Pragmatic and Typological Aspects
Interrogative Constructions in Guaraní: Grammatical, Pragmatic and Typological Aspects, 2022
This article is set in the framework of typological and functional studies on interrogativity, and focuses on the study of Guaraní, based on primary data collected in Formosa (Argentina). Interrogative constructions encode the speaker’s request for information, and their intention to confirm the underlying statement of the information that is the focus of the question. This topic has been partially addressed in previous descriptive works on Guaraní. There are, however, aspects in this domain yet to be explored. One involves the functions and meanings of the different interrogative strategies this language exhibits and the semantic particularities of their combination. In this regard, we analyze the distribution, meaning and pragmatic function of clitics =pa and =piko in polar and content questions. Furthermore, a preliminary analysis of tag questions (as a subtype of polar questions) is advanced here. Finally, we also discuss the way how the concurrence of interrogative words and clitics in Guarani is pragmatically and semantically motivated by the speaker’s epistemic attitude when posing the question.