Search results for "Verb"
showing 10 items of 1089 documents
Polar meaning and “expletive” negation in approximative adverbs
2005
In this paper we provide a synchronic and diachronic analysis of an instance of so-called “expletive” negation in the Spanish approximative adverb por poco. Synchronically, we show that this adverb, when combined with the sentence negator no, is ambiguous between ~p (“expletive”) and ~~p (“canonical”) meanings. Diachronically, we show that this ambiguity arose due to a change in the negation system of Spanish around the fifteenth century. As a result, the supposed instances of “expletive” negation found in present-day uses of por poco are not really expletive at all, but rather are a holdover from the Old Spanish requirement of preverbal negative concord.
“He should so be in jail”: An Empirical Study on Preverbal So in American English
2021
This paper explores the use of so-called GenX so as a modifier of verb phrases, as exemplified in “He should so be in jail” (SOAP, DAYS, 2005). Drawing on over 1350 relevant tokens retrieved from the Corpus of American Soap Operas (SOAP) (Davies 2011-, 100 million words from 2001-2012), the main purpose of the present study is to provide robust empirical evidence for various findings yielded by small-scale studies and by introspection. The results corroborate some of the previous findings, while others, particularly those based on introspection, are challenged in light of empirical (counter)evidence. The data show that preverbal so is very flexible in that it can occur in various syntactic…
Compounds, phrases and clitics in connected speech
2017
Abstract Four language production experiments examine how English speakers plan compound words during phonological encoding. The experiments tested production latencies in both delayed and online tasks for English noun-noun compounds (e.g., daytime), adjective-noun phrases (e.g., dark time), and monomorphemic words (e.g., denim). In delayed production, speech onset latencies reflect the total number of prosodic units in the target sentence. In online production, speech latencies reflect the size of the first prosodic unit. Compounds are metrically similar to adjective-noun phrases as they contain two lexical and two prosodic words. However, in Experiments 1 and 2, native English speakers tr…
Areal Typology and Grammaticalization
1996
Grammaticalization processes in East and mainland South East Asian languages show remarkable areal parallels within the domain of the verb and the noun. Since language contact increases processes of reanalysis it supports grammaticalization and its cross-linguistic similarity. Grammaticalization processes are governed by attractor positions (cf. 1.1.3.) and pathways of grammaticalization (cf. 1.1..4.). The former is a good parameter for making areal distinctions, the latter is of areal relevance only within the domain of the verb. Because of attractor positions, grammaticalization processes are not necessarily slow and gradual. The distribution of attractor positions relative to each other …
Verb inflection in Ancient Greek and Sanskrit and auxiliation patterns in French and Italian. Forms, functions, system
2009
This paper deals with the complex interaction between form and function in the verb morphosyntax of four Indo-European languages (French, Italian, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit). Beyond the difference in form, auxiliation patterns in French and Italian, and verb inflections in Ancient Greek and Sanskrit correlate, thanks to the agreement for number and person, to the expression of the relationship with the Subject. The different auxiliation patterns (sum and habeo) and the different inflections (middle and active) correlate to different properties of the Subject. In particular, these forms depend on the syntactic opposition between middle and non-middle. The ways of this dependency are regulat…
Precategoriality and syntax-based parts of speech
2008
Late Archaic Chinese is a precategorial language, i.e., a language whose lexical items are not preclassified in the lexicon for the syntactic functions of N and V. This will be shown on the basis of structural-conceptual criteria as those developed by Croft (2000) and Sasse (1993b) as well as on the basis of methodological criteria as those suggested by Evans & Osada (2005). As is claimed in Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1995, 2005), the meaning of lexical items is derived by integrating their own lexical meaning with the meaning contributed by the construction. The construction analysed in this paper is the argument structure construction. Linking between lexicon and syntax is subject…
La linguistique des grammaires françaises publiées en Espagne dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle
2005
RésuméDans cet article, nous examinons un corpus de 13 grammaires pour l’enseignement du français aux Espagnols, éditées dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle. Nous prenons en compte, dans une analyse de type transversal, (1) les sources citées par les auteurs ; (2) la nature de la définition de la grammaire et le nombre des parties du discours ; (3) la définition du nom (avec la présence ou non du schéma canonique de la déclinaison ou des classes spécifiques de cet élément) ; (4) la définition du verbe avec la présence ou non des catégories canoniques) ; et (5) la syntaxe. Notre objectif est de déterminer la linguistique explicite et implicite de ces grammaires scolaires, à une époque où …
The agreement of existential haber in three varieties of spoken Spanish
2020
Abstract This paper aims to present one of the most relevant linguistic phenomena of spoken Spanish on both sides of the Atlantic. The singular/plural forms of the verb haber with existential meaning have received considerable attention due to the fact that it is a linguistic variable that changes according to the variety of Spanish that is used. We report the findings from the research carried out within three speech communities: Valencia, Las Palmas and Mexico City, analysing the internal and external factors that may explain this linguistic variation. For this study we have selected these communities because all the data have been obtained according to the guidelines proposed in the PRES…
The translatability into Italian of the German stance marking modal particles wohl, eben and ja. Between epistemicity and evidentiality
2015
Contrary to Italian and many other languages, German has a linguistic means to mark the speaker’s stance: the so-called modal particles, such as wohl, eben and ja. This paper examines their occurrence in a German novel and their possible translations in its Italian version. It analyses their complex meaning arising from the intertwined relations between speaker – hearer – state of affairs as the three key entities of stance they mark and the textual or situational context, concluding that they have only covert epistemic and evidential features. This cross-linguistic analysis proves that it is impossible not only to translate them, but also to draw a clear borderline between epistemicity and…
L'auxiliation en Italien
1997
This article is based on the results of a study dealing with the various classes of Italian verbs (modals, aspectuels, verbs of movement, progressives, avere da + infinitive) that attract the clitic pronouns from their base position. Their "climbing" is accounted for by excluding any sentence boundary in the domain of the clitic movement. Since this is exactly the traditional structure of the verb-auxiliary relationship, the following hypothesis is made: the verb phrases of a single sentence comprise, in addition to the main verb, an indefinite number of complementary verbs (the ones listed above plus the temporal/aspectual and passive auxiliaries). As a result, their distribution becomes u…