Search results for "determiner"

Sandwich EPP hypothesis: Evidence from child Finnish

2010

It is well-known that grammatical movement is somehow linked to functional heads. There is less agreement on the excact nature of this correlation. According to one view, phrases are moved to the specifier positions of functional heads because functional heads attract them. According to another view, movement is not triggered by functional heads alone, but depends on the larger grammatical context. For instance, one such proposal says that T (tense) becomes attractive only when selected by finite C (complementizer), while V becomes attractive when selected byv* (transitivizer). What attracts phrases are therefore the C–T system and thev*–V system as a whole, not the individual functional he…

Quantifying nouns in Italian

2012

Definiteness Marking Shows Late Effects during Discourse Processing: Evidence from ERPs

2009

This paper investigates the processing of indefinite and definite noun phrases in discourse. It presents data from an Event-Related brain Potential (ERP) study that contrasted definite and indefinite noun phrases following three distinct context sentences. The data suggest that coherence considerations influence early processing stages, while morphological definiteness features only affect later stages during reference resolution. In addition, the processing of a definite determiner (prior to encountering the subsequent noun) exerts processing demands, supporting the functional contribution of definiteness marking. Supplementary data from a plausibility questionnaire and two completion stud…

The Bua Group noun class system: Looking for a historical interpretation

2020

International audience; The way Bua languages express number on nouns mostly consists ofalternating suffi xes that bear witness of a former classifi cation system. However,Kulaal is the only present-day language where these markers are not frozen butactually trigger agreement with free, optional determiners that follow the noun andmay show some formal affi nity with its suffi x. For several reasons, previous attemptsat reconstructing a historical noun morphology common to all Bua languagesconsidered the sole suffi xes and neglected the determiners present in Kulaal. But,as is argued in the present paper, more recent data show that, in some cases, presentdaysuffi xes may result from the asso…

Synonymy: The unbearable ficklness of meaning

2010

Standard definitions of synonymy become problematic under close scrutiny of nouns occurring in two contexts of Italian: clauses with Negative Polarity Items and noun phrases with Complex Nominal Determiners. Such nouns are non-referring expressions, do not carry literal meaning, often give rise to metaphor and intensity, and preclude decomposition into elementary semantic features as conceived in Componential Analysis. The inconsequence of semantic features and a number of syntactic constraints suggest that these nouns are best analyzed as parts of multi-word expressions working as function phrases.

Nominal Agreement in L2 Speakers of Italian: Suggestions for a Teaching Plan

2021

International audience; This paper addresses the topic of adult acquisition of nominal agreement in Italian, a crucial issue in teaching Italian as Second/Foreign Language. Building on a corpus containing spontaneous and semi-spontaneous production data from two advanced L2-speakers of Italian, I show that nominal agreement can be problematic even in the last stages of the acquisition process. The discussion of the instances of missing agreement in the corpus suggests that these are not due to a missing knowledge of the agreement rules in Italian, but instead on processing and production. In particular, some contexts prove to be more difficult than others: gender agreement (i.e., agreement …

Spoken word recognition with gender-marked context.

2006

In a cross-modal (auditory-visual) fragment priming study in French, we tested the hypothesis that gender information given by a gender-marked article (e.g. unmasculine or unefeminine) is used early in the recognition of the following word to discard gender-incongruent competitors. In four experiments, we compared lexical decision performances on targets primed by phonological information only (e.g. /kRa/-CRAPAUD /kRapo/; /to/-TOAD) or by phonological plus gender information given by a gender-marked article (e.g. unmasculine /kra/-CRAPAUD; a /to/-TOAD). In all experiments, we found a phonological priming effect that was not modulated by the presence of gender context, whether gender-marked …

A diachronic study of the (negative) additive «anche» in italian

2016

Resum: En italià modern (IM), els mots additius negatius són elements focalitzadors que típicament se sotmeten a la concordança negativa amb una negació oracional o amb un altre element legitimador de la negació. En aquest article investiguem l’evolució diacrònica d’un element additiu negatiu, neanche ‘ni/ni tan sols’. En italià antic (IA, varietat florentina entre 1200 i 1370), no hi ha testimonis de focalitzadors additius negatius morfològicament complexos com neanche. En canvi, l’element corresponent no negatiu additiu, anche, podia combinar-se amb un marcador negatiu o amb algun altre element negatiu: né/non… anche ‘ni/ni tan sols’. Mostrem que en IA (i) el mot additiu no negatiu anche …

Function Words Constrain On-Line Recognition of Verbs and Nouns in French 18-Month-Olds

2013

In this experiment using the conditioned head-turn procedure, 18-month-old French-learning toddlers were trained to respond to either a target noun (“la balle”/the ball) or a target verb (“je mange”/I eat). They were then tested on target word recognition in two syntactic contexts: the target word was preceded either by a correct function word (“une balle”/a ball or “on mange”/they eat), or by an incorrect function word, signaling a word from the other category (*“on balle”/they ball or *“une mange”/a eat). We showed that 18-month-olds exploit the syntactic context on-line to recognize the target word: verbs were recognized when preceded by a personal pronoun but not when preceded by a dete…

The relation between language and cognition in 3- to 9-year-olds: the acquisition of grammatical gender in French.

2007

International audience; The French language has a grammatical gender system in which all nouns are assigned either a masculine or a feminine gender. Nouns provide two types of gender cues that can potentially guide gender attribution: morphophonological cues carried by endings and semantic cues (natural gender). The first goal of this study was to describe the acquisition of the probabilistic system based on phonological oppositions on word endings by French-speaking children. The second goal was to explore the extent to which this system affects categorization. In the study, 3- to 9-year-olds assigned gender categorization to invented nouns whose endings were typically masculine, typically…