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The aim of the study was to explore the Finnish preservice and inservice teachers' knowledge of language constructs relevant for literacy acquisition. A total of 150 preservice teachers and 74 inservice teachers participated in the study by filling out a questionnaire that assessed self-perceived expertise in reading instruction, knowledge of phonology and phonics, and knowledge of morphology. The inservice teachers outperformed the preservice teachers in knowledge of phonology and phonics, as well as morphology. Both groups' knowledge of morphology was markedly lower than their knowledge of phonology and phonics. Because early reading instruction does not focus on the morphological level of language but is phonics-based, this result was expected. However, the findings also revealed a lack of explicit knowledge of basic phonological constructs and less-than-optimal phonemic awareness skills in both groups. Problems in phonemic skills manifested mostly as responding to the phonological tasks based on orthographic knowledge, which reflects an overreliance on the one-to-one correspondence between graphemes and phonemes. The preservice teachers' perceptions of expertise were weakly related to their knowledge and skills. Among the inservice teachers, perceived expertise and knowledge of language constructs were completely unrelated. Although the study was exploratory, these findings suggest that within the Finnish teacher education there is a need to focus more on explicit content studies for language structures and the concepts relevant for literacy instruction, as well as phonological and phonemic skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There seems to be no construction that would code specifically the possession relation of external possessors. Instead, various host constructions such as the free-affectee construction (a subtype of which is the free-dative construction), monotransitive or applicative construction can - to a different degree - accommodate participants that are bound by a possession relation. The binding procedure identifying the possessor operates at the pragmatic-semantic interface and takes into account the semantic roles of the event participants, their discourse saliency and lexical properties (such as animacy), world knowledge, properties of the possessum (such as the degree of (in)alienability), etc. The external-possession relation and the meaning of the hosting construction are orthogonal to each other, but there is a strong interplay between them. Positing a dedicated external-possessor construction faces the following problems: the same binding procedure is found in other constructions as well (such as the monotransitive or ditransitive constructions); at the same time, the very possession relation is only inconsistently found in constructions referred to as external-possessor constructions, and, what is more, the possession relation may sometimes be canceled (even if it is inalienable). To account for this terminologically, I introduce the term non-thematic affectee construction, a subtype of which is the free (non-thematic) affectee construction particularly spread in European languages. The latter is found with different types of coding (accusative, dative, different prepositional phrases) which have different diachronic sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics / Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada (John Benjamins Publishing Co.) is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Russian Linguistics is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The goal of this article is to investigate the temporal properties of German present participles, occurring prenominally and in secondary predication, in an event semantic approach. Empirically, the study relies in part on the corpus-based descriptions of prenominal participles presented in Lübbe & Rapp (2011). I will argue that--according to Keshet's (2008) Intersective Predicate Generalization--present participles are always temporally dependent on their sister constituent. If they occur in secondary predication, this sister constituent is the main clause VP; if they occur prenominally, it is the modified noun. The temporal relation with the noun / the main clause predicate is simultaneity (cf. Kusumoto 1999, 2005), but this simultaneity relation can be altered by temporal adverbials like gestern 'yesterday' and früher 'formerly'. The article will also consider whether there is a grammatically determined temporal relation between a prenominal present participle and the main clause. I will argue that prenominal present participles are dependent on the main clause predicate only if the participle is embedded in a DP with a non-presuppositional (= indefinite) determiner. Nonpresuppositional determiners create intersective temporal interpretations: they lexically fix the interpretation of their NP complement (including attributes) as being simultaneous with the main clause predicate. Presuppositional determiners, in contrast, do not fix such a relation, that is the temporal interpretation of the NP complement (including attributes) is semantically free and guided by pragmatic principles (cf. Musan 1997, 1999, Tonhauser 2012). There are, however, some apparent counterexamples to the temporal dependency of (syntactically or lexically given) intersective structures (cf. Kusumoto 1999; Tonhauser 2012). I will show that the intersective interpretation can be maintained if we assume that these examples involve a specific kind of noun, label nouns. These are personal nouns referring to situations that can be used to characterize an individual even when the situation is already over (Mörder 'murderer', Flüchtling 'fugitive'). The article is structured as follows: I begin by presenting the relevant data in section 1. Then, in section 2, I present an event semantic account of present participle phrases in different positions. Section 3 examines the role the determiner plays in the interpretation of prenominal participles, and section 4 focuses on cases with a definite determiner. Section 5 looks at some examples which seem to be problematic for the interpretation of intersective structures and introduces the concept of label nouns. Finally, section 6 examines the combination of temporal adverbials with present participles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of Borer's (2005) theory of nominal classification, the aim of this paper is to explain why measure words in some languages (English, French, Hebrew) necessarily take an -s (two bottles of milk versus *two bottle of milk) while in other languages (Azeri, Persian, Ojibwe) measure words can surface without plural marking (the equivalent of two bottle of milk is grammatical). If we assume -s in English-type languages is responsible for division in measure constructions (as in Borer 2005), we face the following puzzle: What is responsible for division in Azeri-type languages in the absence of the plural? We argue that, for a number of reasons, it cannot be the numeral (two) and propose that division is performed, in the absence of a plural, by measure words themselves (as in Chierchia 1998; Stavrou 2003; Acquaviva 2008, among others). We argue that whether or not plural marking appears on the measure word depends on a higher projection that expresses the counting function (distinct from the classifying/measuring function, Rothstein 2010b). Measure constructions thus provide evidence for the idea that, in addition to the dividing plural, we need a higher, counting plural, bolstering the hypothesis that the plural comes in many flavours (Acquaviva 2008; Harbour 2008; Wiltschko 2008, 2012; Butler 2012; Mathieu 2012, 2013, 2014). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Expletives have been argued to be merged in Spec, TP, Spec, vP, or within DP. This paper argues that this line of thought does not apply to the existential expletive fii of Jordanian Arabic. The arguments presented in this paper rest on the assumption that merge of fii in any of those proposed merge sites cannot be empirically substantiated since it does not account for data from Jordanian Arabic. It is argued instead that, in an existential construction, fii heads its own projection, an expletive phrase, with the associate projected as complement of the expletive. Further, the expletive phrase is argued to merge in the specifier of a predicate phrase, whose head is a null adjectival predicate. Therefore, the view of fii as a syntactic dummy is reconsidered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Estonian & Finno-Ugric Linguistics / Eesti ja Soome-ugri Keeleteaduse Ajakiri is the property of University of Tartu Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This dissertation offers a thorough examination of the Modern Greek distributive determiner. Specific focus is placed on particular parameters that involve whole sentences, which seem to result in different readings (semantic interpretations). I conclude through my analysis, which is circumscribed within the syntax-LF interface, that a common mechanism of Agree/binding is responsible for the emergence of these different readings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper addresses the status of the comitative and terminative in contemporary Votic and Lower Luga Ingrian. In published sources on Votic, both markers were qualified in the same way: either as case markers or as postpositions. For Ingrian, no detailed research of the question was ever conducted. The analysis presented in this paper is based on a set of phonetic, morphological and syntactic criteria comparing the comitative and terminative with prototypical cases and postpositions in both languages. The resulting scale shows that the comitative behaves quite differently from the terminative. Both markers are neither unambiguous cases nor postpositions, but the terminative demonstrates mostly postpositional features while the comitative is rather close to a case. The status of the comitative and terminative in Lower Luga Ingrian is similar but not identical to Votic; in particular the Ingrian comitative marker has harmonic variants but cannot mark adjectives in NP. A very specific feature of Lower Luga Ingrian is the coexistence of parallel comitative forms with and without -n (-nka/-nkä vs. -ka/-kä). Both variants probably emerged under the Votic influence, and represent two different strategies of borrowing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metaphoric language can be examined either from the standpoint of conceptual structure or from the perspective of linguistic form. The role of conceptual metaphor in metaphoric language has received considerable attention, notably in Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Blending Theory, but the impact of linguistic form remains less well understood. Brooke-Rose’s A Grammar of Metaphor (1958) presents subjective impressions of various forms, and more recently, cognitive linguists have examined the metaphoric uses of individual grammatical constructions. However, Stockwell offers the most methodical and comprehensive comparison of metaphorically used constructions along a specified parameter, that of ‘visibility’ (1992, 2000, 2002). On the cline of visibility, constructions range from the most visible constructions, such as simile, to the least visible, such as allegory.The current article draws on Sullivan’s (2013) study of the role of grammatical constructions in metaphoric language to examine and refine Stockwell’s cline of visibility, inputting the syntactic characteristics of Stockwell’s metaphoric constructions into a multidimensional scaling analysis. The results support Stockwell’s dimension of ‘visibility’, but suggest that the distinctions between metaphorically used constructions are better accounted for in a two-dimensional analysis that considers the dimension of ‘economy’ – the linguistic complexity required to express a conceptual metaphor – alongside ‘visibility’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that integration of code-switched items into the Matrix Language is not a straightforward process and does not entirely depend on the structural characteristics of the languages involved. Estonian-Russian code-switching is instructive because both languages are rich in inflectional morphology. Full integration of Estonian nouns into the Russian matrix means gender assignment and adding of inflection (case, number, or case and number). Russian-Estonian code-switching data demonstrate a wide range of possibilities for integration. Zabrodskaja (2009b) specifies six gradations of morphological integration, whereby morphological integration and phonological adaptation do not depend on each other: an Estonian item may show high phonological adaptation and no morphological integration into Russian, and vice versa. Empirical observations show that there are instances where Russian inflectional morphology is absent, although the Estonian noun fits structurally into Russian declension classes. This paper compares the integration of Estonian nouns into Russian morphosyntax in speech and in blogs. Both sets of data show similarities as far as types of integration are concerned. Morphological integration is often a matter of individual preference and variation rather than structural compatibility with the Russian matrix. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the emergence of bilingual constructions in conversational data from two groups of first-generation Finns living in Estonia: 1) students and migrant workers who had been living in Estonia 0-17 years at the time the data was collected between 2002 and 2011; and 2) Ingrian Finns, who migrated to Soviet Estonia around World War II and had been living in the country for more than 50 years at the time of recording in the 1990s. All the participants in the current study use resources from Finnish and Estonian, and in both sets of data there is co-occurrence of elements from both, but the language mixing patterns are very different. While some language mixing such as in the students' and workers' speech is predictable in this kind of contact setting, the immigrants from the Soviet era show signs of severe language attrition that is not typically found among first-generation speakers. Among the recent immigrants, Estonian influence on Finnish morphology and morphosyntax is occasional whereas in the case of the Ingrian Finns, language mixing often occurs throughout the conversation and involves blending of morphological and syntactic constructions from both languages. Recurrent blending of certain constructions from the two languages especially in the Ingrian Finnish data indicates a dynamic towards establishing a new bilingual grammar. Furthermore, the comparison of the two datasets shows the effect that social factors and the length of stay have on first-generation immigrants' language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the notion of politeness formulae in linguistic politeness research. It argues that the formal make-up of politeness formulae is crucially motivated by their function. The major claim of this paper is thus that there is a link between form and function of expressions of linguistic politeness. The usefulness of this account will be illustrated by the analysis of empirical data from Slavic languages and German. Reference to Roman Jakobson's markedness theory will show that the choice of linguistic means is not only dependent on concrete contexts (as is usually claimed in linguistic politeness theory) but also motivated by the language system itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conclusion: The Finnish Matrix Test is the first sentence test in noise for the Finnish language. It was developed according to the HearCom standards and provides reliable speech intelligibility measurements with highly comparable results with the other international matrix tests. Objectives: The aim of the study was to develop an accurate speech intelligibility test in noise for the Finnish language that is comparable across different languages. Methods: We chose a matrix sentence test, which comprises a base matrix of 10 names, verbs, numerals, adjectives and nouns. Test lists were formed from this matrix quasi randomly, providing test sentences of the same syntactical structure. The speech material corresponds to everyday spoken language and the phoneme distribution is representative of the Finnish language. The test was optimized by determining the speech recognition thresholds of the individual words and subsequently by applying level corrections of up to ±3 dB. Evaluation measurements were performed to check the equivalence of the different test lists with respect to speech intelligibility and to provide reference values for further clinical applications. Results: After training, the mean speech recognition threshold (SRT) and the slope of the final test lists were -10.1 ± 0.1 dB signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR)and 16.7 ± 1.2%/dB, respectively (measurements at constant level; inter-list variability). The mean SRT and the slope of the test subjects were -10.1 ± 0.7 dB SNR and 17.5 ± 2.2%/dB (measurements at constant level; inter-subject variability). The expected SRT range for normal-hearing young adults for adaptive measurements is -9.7 ± 0.7 dB SNR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study in the research field of literary multilingualism and literary codeswitching is based on Mikael Niemi's novelMannen som dog som en lax(2006) [The man who died like a salmon]. The novel is set mainly in Tornedalen, a widely bilingual area in Sweden where many people speak both Swedish and Meänkieli, a national minority language in Sweden since 2000. All instances of codeswitching in the material studied were identified and an analysis, based on Eriksson and Haapamäki's model designed to analyse literary multilingualism and literary codeswitching, was performed. The model consists of three main components: (1) the communicative context of the analysed work; (2) the form of codeswitching in the analysed work; and (3) the possible literary functions of codeswitching in the analysed work. The sender, Mikael Niemi, does not consider himself bilingual and most intended receivers are not bilingual either, even though linguistic conditions are central to the theme of the novel. Swedish is the base language of the novel, while elements of Meänkieli/Finnish, varieties of Swedish, and other languages represent a small fraction of the entire text. Implicit literary codeswitching predominates in the material in the form of metalinguistic comments and contextualization cues. By far the most common type of explicit literary codeswitching is between Swedish and Meänkieli/Finnish. The novel contains examples of literary codeswitching used in attempts to reproduce authentic usage and depict an authentic linguistic setting. In other examples, Tornedalen, Tornedalians and Meänkieli/Finnish are depicted as exotic phenomena compared with the majority society. Likewise, there are examples of how certain passages in the novel may include or exclude readers, depending on their understanding of Meänkieli/Finnish. Certain elements of Meänkieli can be interpreted as expressions of linguistic emancipation and the liberation of identity that empowers speakers of Meänkieli and the community of these speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a systematic account of the spatial expressions of Shupamem, a Grassfields Bantu language of Cameroon that has very few items clearly identified as spatial prepositions, a good number of nouns that are used to denote locational relations, and a small and well-defined set of items in the extended projection of spatial Ps that denote the speaker's point of view, but often give the impression of locative or directional Ps. It is proposed that the structure of Shupamem locative PPs consists of two core components: (a) a functional head, P, and (b) a nominal complement. Either component may surface without phonetic content once specific requirements are met, namely, once the Edge of the PP is minimally overt. We claim that the nominal complements denoting location, unlike referential nouns, depend on P for their interpretation, as a result of which they may move to its Edge and license a silent P. A silent P is also licensed by the elements that denote speaker point of view, via movement of the silent P to the point of view head; this results in phase extension, and explains the obligatory presence of point of view markers in some contexts, giving the impression they are Ps. The account proposed for Shupamem offers a unified treatment of the functional structure of spatial Ps across typologically different languages, while it investigates how silent parts of the spatial P structure are licensed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Morphological analysis and disambiguation are crucial stages in a variety of natural language processing applications, especially when languages with complex morphology are concerned. We present a system which disambiguates the output of a morphological analyzer for Hebrew. It consists of several simple classifiers and a module that combines them under the constraints imposed by the analyzer. We explore several approaches to classifier combination, as well as a back-off mechanism that relies on a large unannotated corpus. Our best result, around 83 percent accuracy, compares favorably with the state of the art on this task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the genitive of negation in Russian, one of the most well-studied case alternations that exists in the language and the most well-known diagnostic for unaccusativity. Direct objects and subjects of unaccusative predicates may occur in the genitive case under sentential negation, alternating with accusative and nominative, respectively. When these Noun Phrases (NPs) appear in the genitive, they tend to receive an indefinite, non-specific, or existential interpretation. Recent semantic analyses of this construction argue that such NPs are best treated as properties of type , which are the result of a type-shifting operation. In this paper, we examine five different types of approaches in analyzing this construction and show that in spite of the range of proposals that exists, a number of issues remain. The genitive of negation presents a puzzle that lies at the heart of the syntax-semantics interface. Putting together the syntactic and semantic generalizations that have been noted for this construction in a coherent way can shed light on the overall architecture of the grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Philologia is the property of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The topic of this article is the structural similarity of neighboring languages belonging to two different branches of the Germanic languages.The German-Danish border region is characterized by longitudinal language contact between West and North Germanic varieties which have developed common features not to be found in other varieties of these languages spoken outside the contact area. These shared features are results of contact and/or of language shift(s). This paper focuses on convergence in verb phrases. Nine examples of different aspects of verbal convergences are presented covering mainly semantic and syntactical code-copying. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A striking cross-linguistic generalisation about the semantics of determiners is that they never express non-conservative relations. To account for this one might hypothesise that the mechanisms underlying human language acquisition are unsuited to non-conservative determiner meanings. We present experimental evidence that 4- and 5-year-olds fail to learn a novel non-conservative determiner but succeed in learning a comparable conservative determiner, consistent with the learnability hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this brief article is to investigate four-year-olds' interpretation of attributive measure phrases (MPs), such as3-pound, and the role of cardinality in mediating children's responses. In two experiments, I demonstrate that children at this age are starting to recognize that such MPs refer to a property of an individual, such as weight per unit (rather than the weight of an entire collection). Accordingly, they distinguish between attributive and pseudopartitive MPs. However, when the opportunity presents itself to treat the number word as referring to the cardinality of a set, some children succumb to this pressure, deviating from adult-like responses. I argue that the fundamental aspect of number word meaning that children take the first few years of life to master—that number words denote exact cardinality of a set of discrete objects—is precisely the aspect they must overcome when interpreting these MPs. However, the evidence shows that four-year-olds are well on their way to doing so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Except for arms and armor, the decorated sword in particular, reference to other types of ornamental metal-work in the Anglo-Saxon Riddles remains unnoted. Moreover, the transparency of the sword clues in some riddles has been problematic, inviting dismissive treatment, emendation or far-fetched solution and re-interpretation in order to vindicate them as properly clever examples of the riddle genre. If, however, we look more closely at the central role of Old English laf in these riddles, their simple subjects become impressively complex, both visually and rhetorically. I argue here that the artistry of Riddles 5, 20, 56, 71 and 91 mirrors that of the metal-worked objects they describe, and that in the case of Riddle 91, the objects are not confined to swords. In leading the reader from the visual complexities of the artifact to the social complexities of human interaction, Old English laf brings the violence of artistic creation into ambivalent relationship with the violence of human nature; each riddle conjures a scene that requires a moment of moral reflection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The experience of a user of major search engines or other web information retrieval services looking for information in the Basque language is far from satisfactory: they only return pages with exact matches but no inflections (necessary for an agglutinative language like Basque), many results in other languages (no search engine gives the option to restrict its results to Basque), etc. This paper proposes using morphological query expansion and language-filtering words in combination with the APIs of search engines as a very cost-effective solution to build appropriate web search services for Basque. The implementation details of the methodology (choosing the most appropriate language-filtering words, the number of them, the most frequent inflections for the morphological query expansion, etc.) have been specified by corpora-based studies. The improvements produced have been measured in terms of precision and recall both over corpora and real web searches. Morphological query expansion can improve recall up to 47 % and language-filtering words can raise precision from 15 % to around 90 %, although with a loss in recall of about 30-35 %. The proposed methodology has already been successfully used in the Basque search service Elebila () and the web-as-corpus tool CorpEus (), and the approach could be applied to other morphologically rich or under-resourced languages as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an analysis of Korean adverbial case constructions from a Cognitive Grammar viewpoint. I argue that nominative-marked adverbials are the result of the setting-subject construal of the adverbial. Accusative-marked adverbials, then, are construed as a location, which is part of the setting. I also argue that the notion of setting-subject is associated with the imperfective construal of a given situation in conjunction with the subject's lower degree of topicality. Conversely, the locational interpretation of an adverbial is tied to the perfective construal of a situation and a higher degree of topicality of the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linguists have for a long time been in two opposing camps regarding how to explain the phenomenon of floating quantifiers, exemplified in the following two sentences: (i) All the students have read the book. (ii) The students have all read the book. The quantifier all in (i) modifies the phrase the students. The question is what enables the quantifier to float away from the phrase that it modifies in (ii). For a long time, many linguists have believed that (i) and (ii) are unrelated. They have assumed that the subject in (i) is 'all the students' and that the subject in (ii) is 'the students,' with 'all' being a kind of adverb located in a typical adverbial position, right next to the verb phrase. This approach is usually called the Adverbial Approach to floating quantifiers. In 1988 a theory was developed whereby (i) and (ii) are the same sentence. Under this approach the subject of both sentences is 'all the students,' but in (ii) the phrase 'the students' has moved to a higher position in the sentence and has stranded the quantifier next to the verb. This approach, called the Stranding Analysis, generated enthusiasm when it was first presented in 1988, but its success was short-lived. It was found to have weaknesses, and this caused many linguists to return to various adverbial approaches. Linguists are still very much divided on the subject. The purpose of this article is first of all to explain what the debate on floating quantifiers is all about and secondly to argue that if one updates the Stranding Analysis for more recent developments in generative linguistic theory, and if one considers more data in more languages, one will find that it is too early to write off the Stranding Analysis and declare the Adverbial Approach the winner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses morphological case variation, arguing that individual cases are not syntactic objects or features but PF interpretations of a range of different underlying syntactic relations. Nevertheless, it turns out that case variation can, to a large extent, be analyzed in terms of only two atomic ‘ingredients’: event licensing of NPs and PF marking of the licensing relation (where marking is analyzed in terms of Chomskyan case stars). Ergative is a Voice/ag*-case, whereas accusative is a v*-case, licensed under c-command by Voice/ag (ergative and accusative marking thus being two sides of the same coin). Individual cases in case-expanding morphological/PF case systems, it is argued, behave like viruses, striving to expand beyond their original ‘reasonable’ domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whether a stative predicate licenses an existential interpretation of its subject (EIS) depends in part on the type of object it has. While previous theories have related this to the object's ability to function as a topic, this paper presents evidence that the quantized/homogeneous distinction between objects better captures EIS and proposes an event composition analysis of EIS for (transitive) stative predicates. This analysis points to the aspectual nature of EIS and also illuminates other aspectual behaviors of stage-level/individual-level states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines the shortcomings found in two well-known syntax-based typologies of internally headed relative constructions (IHRCs), and demonstrates the benefits of a typology that relies on the syntax-semantics interface and takes semantics seriously into account. It is argued that the latter approach yields a more revealing and empirically superior typology of IHRCs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper summarizes current findings in the cross-linguistic study of meteorological constructions. It provides both a typology of weather events and a typology of encoding formats used for the expression of weather in and across languages. The discussion shows that there is a correlation between these two parameters: there are clear tendencies in the distribution of the various encoding types across the various event types. This gives rise to a typology of languages which explains linguistic variation in the encoding of meteorological events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The classic version of the linguistic relativity principle, formulated by Boas and developed especially in the work of Whorf, suggests that the particular lexicogrammatical patterns of a given language can influence the thought of its speakers. A second version of the argument emerged in the 1970s and shifted the focus to the indexical aspect of language: any given language includes a particular set of indexical signs, and these essentially shape the contexts produced in speaking that language. In this article, we propose a third locus of linguistic relativity. Our argument is based on recent work in conversation analysis that has shown how the resources of a given language provide the tools for accomplishing basic actions in interaction. To develop our argument, we consider the way in which the resources of three different languages (Caribbean English Creole, Finnish, and Lao) are deployed by speakers to agree with a prior assessment while at the same time claiming greater epistemic authority over the matter assessed. Our case study indicates that the language-specific tools used to accomplish this action (the lexicogrammatical resources) introduce collateral effects and in this way give the action a local spin or inflection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This squib investigates parallels between nominal and verbal comparatives. Building on key insights of Hackl (2000) and Bale & Barner (2009), we show that more behaves uniformly when it combines with nominal and verbal predicates: (i) it cannot combine with singular count NPs or perfective telic VPs; (ii) grammatical properties of the predicates determine the scale of comparison—plural marked NPs and habitual VPs are compared on a scale of cardinality, whereas mass NPs and perfective (atelic) VPs are (often) compared along non-cardinal, though monotonic, scales. Taken together, our findings confirm and strengthen parallels that have independently been drawn between the nominal and verbal domains. In addition, our discussion and data, drawn from English, Spanish, and Bulgarian, suggest that the semantic contribution of more can be given a uniform analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the adjectives which exhibit different properties from one language to the other. These adjectives show properties in common to both nouns and verbs. The article presents information on the Iroquoian languages which define even an adjectival subclass of verb roots. It informs that Cherokee is the only Southern Iroquoian language of an adjective class that evidently arises subsequent to the north-south split.

The paper proposes that there are two types of binominal qualitative constructions in Romanian: single-DP qualitatives and double-DP qualitatives (henceforth SDPQs and DDPQs). The constructions falling in the first category will be analyzed as single projections while the second type of qualitatives will be shown to display the behavior of dual projections (van Riemsdijk 1998). As single projections, SDPQs consist of a DP-embedded split NP; on the other hand, DDPQs consist of two full DPs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I find support for the idea that plural marking shows variation across languages but can still be captured in a universal syntax (Wiltschko 2008, 2011). The proposal that the plural morpheme heads the Number Phrase (Ritter 1991; Bernstein 1991; Valois 1991; inter alia ) is not adequate to account for plural marking in all languages. Wiltschko (2008) proposed that plurals may merge either as heads or adjuncts to various projections along the spine of the Determiner Phrase (DP, NurnP, nP and the root). I provide syntactic, semantic and experimental evidence that the plural morpheme in Yucatec Maya is adjoined to the DP. I highlight evidence from other language types for variation in the syntax of plural marking, and I discuss how this variation might be constrained in particular ways. The implication of these findings is that identity of function does not imply identical syntax or semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Finnic radical stop gradation affected stop consonants in the onset position of unstressed syllables. The stops were weakened before closed syllables, and remained unweakened before open syllables. Stop gradation, conditioned by whether the following syllable was open or closed, is cross-linguistically extremely rare. In this paper, gradation is argued to be a phonetically natural intervocalic weakening process, which was blocked only in the onsets of open unstressed syllables due to restrictions on moraic structure. Under the proposed account, differences between Finnic languages in terms of gradation depend on the extent to which a specific language tolerated heavy unstressed syllables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Near the beginning of the Cratylus (385e-387d) Plato's Socrates argues, against his friend Hermogenes, that the standards of correctness for our use of names in speech are in no way up to us. Yet this conclusion should strike us, at least initially, as bizarre. After all, how could it not be up to us whether to call our children by the names of our parents, or whether to call dogs 'dogs'? My aim in this paper will be to show that, although Plato's argument does not succeed in establishing this apparently bizarre conclusion, it may well succeed in establishing an equally momentous conclusion: that the standards of correctness for our use of concepts in thought are in no way up to us. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses a fragment of the adnominal genitive that remains in productive use in present-day Dutch, appearing in novel formations like de generatie der babyboomers ''the generation the. gen babyboomers'' and het trillende filmbeeld des levens ''the vibrating film picture the. gen life. gen''. On the basis of written and spoken corpus data, this paper accounts for the structural regularities found in the novel genitives, their relationship to the preposition van ''of'', which succeeded the adnominal genitive, and the place of the genitive in modern Dutch morphosyntax. It is proposed that a constructional approach can account for the genitive's productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the linguistic contacts of the precursors of the present Saami languages with a broad scope, starting with a characterization of human language or languages at the time modern humans began spreading from Africa to other continents and what kind of differences there existed between the languages of modern man and that or those of the Neanderthals in Europe and the Middle East. As an example of how language contacts affect linguistic structure special attention is devoted to the development of negation in the Uralic languages of Europe. It is also shown how loanwords and borrowed place names can be used for reconstructing the contact history of the Saami group of languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agreement and concord involve mismatches between the position where a syntactic or semantic contribution is made and where it is expressed morphologically. Such mismatches are often taken to involve either movement or the spreading and realization of features. I examine a number of superficially different instances of this kind of mismatch that seem to resist an account based on realization and movement alone. I argue that the patterns involved should receive a unified account in terms of licensors, elements subject to a condition of structural economy that associate indirectly with semantically contentful heads through features that those heads spread and that require a c-commanding licensor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the relevance of suffix allomorphy for processing complex words. The question is whether structural invariance of the morphological category (i.e., lack of allomorphy) would affect the processing of Finnish derived words. A series of four visual lexical decision experiments in which alternatively surface and base frequency was manipulated showed that the two invariant suffixes, namely denominal –stO and deadjectival –hkO, showed reliable effects of base frequency, whereas for the two categories with suffix allomorphy, deverbal –Us and deadjectival –(U)Us, only surface frequency played a role. A further experiment showed that even with the most frequent variant of –(U)Us, namely –Ude-, response latencies were a function of surface frequency only. It is shown that neither the results from the experiments here nor previous findings from processing Finnish words can be accounted for by suffix frequency, the frequency ratio between the derived word and its base, or morphological productivity in any straightforward manner. We conclude that the lack of allomorphy, that is, structural invariance, significantly adds to affixal salience and therefore enhances morphological decomposition. The implications of this finding for models of lexical processing are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature generally assumes that object clitic omission is equally allowed in all child languages. In this paper we challenge this claim by means of an elicitation experiment carried out with children acquiring two closely related languages, Catalan and Spanish. Our results show that while omission is high in young Catalan-speaking children, it is very low in Spanish-speaking children. We argue that this difference can be attributed to a property of their respective grammars (the presence or otherwise of past participle agreement when objects cliticize) under the Unique Checking Constraint of Wexler (1998). In a second experiment, we confirm the robustness of early sensitivity to past participle agreement; through a grammaticality judgment task we find a statistically significant difference between the two languages. We show that the parametric approach postulated can be extended, for mandatory, overt objects, beyond Catalan and Spanish, broadening the empirical scope of the Unique Checking Constraint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Tsezic languages form a sub-branch of the Nakh-Daghestanian language family. They have up to eight location markers that can be combined with up to six orientation markers in order to form complex spatial categories. Outside the spatial domain these markers indicate temporal and metaphorical location and orientation. Their grammatical uses include among others the marking of verbal arguments, of nonfinite verb forms in adverbial clauses and the expression of possession or purpose. This paper is meant to provide a comprehensive description of the nonlocal functions in relation to the spatial functions and to reveal the structure in the distribution of nonlocal functions of the cases. The nonlocal uses are not equally distributed among the local cases. Some location and orientation markers have many nonlocal functions while others have almost only local uses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has historically been assumed that comparative (‘more than’, ‘fewer/less than’) and superlative (‘at most’, ‘at least’) quantifiers can be semantically analysed in accordance with their core logical–mathematical properties. However, recent theoretical and experimental work has cast doubt on the validity of this assumption. Geurts & Nouwen (2007) have claimed that superlative quantifiers possess an additional modal component in their semantics that is absent from comparative quantifiers and that this accounts for the previously neglected differences in usage and interpretation between the two types of quantifier that they identify. Their semantically modal hypothesis has received additional support from empirical investigations. In this article, we further corroborate that superlative quantifiers have additional modal interpretations. However, we propose an alternative analysis, whereby these quantifiers possess the semantics postulated by the classical model and the additional aspects of meaning arise as a consequence of psychological complexity and pragmatic implicature. We explain how this model is consistent with the existing empirical findings. Additionally, we present the findings of four novel experiments that support our model above the semantically modal account. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents a study of a between-subjects design experiment on the comprehension of telicity in simple telic predicates (e.g., John filled the bucket) and locatum predicates (e.g., the water filled the bucket) in L1 Spanish. Weist, Wysocka, and Lyytinen (1991) for English and Finnish, and Van Hout (1997, 1998b) for English and Dutch have shown that children up to age 6;06 allow simple telic predicates to have both telic and atelic interpretations. The main objective of this article is to show that children aged 3;09 allow locatum structures to be interpreted as telic, like adults, but allow simple telic predicates to have telic and atelic interpretations. The central claim is that in simple telic predicates, telicity is checked by covert movement, while in locatum predicates, telicity is checked by overt movement. Children misinterpret simple telic predicates because covert movement is an operation that takes place after the branching off to the PF component, but perform like adults when overt movement is involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes Taiwanese A-CL sequences as compound adjectives by treating the classifier inside such sequences as a dimension provider and the adjective as involving an ordering function. Combined with the assumption that classifiers occurring as the CL of A-CL compound adjectives should be divided into single-dimension denoting and multi-dimension denoting elements, the analysis provides a rationale for why the adjectives permitted in A-CL compound adjectives have the interesting and otherwise perplexing property of being so limited in number. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important executive function in “language design” is marking the boundaries of embedded clauses, and of clauses (and clause sequences) in the scopal domain of operators such as conditional ‘if’ and negation. Crosslinguistic comparison reveals a range of devices that have this effect, facilitating parsing by listeners. These include (i) prosody, (ii) constituent ordering, (iii) coordination, (iv) boundary-markingmorphemes, and (v) continuousmorphological indexation. The last two are emphasized in this article, with data from Australian and West African languages. Such boundary-marking functions deserve greater recognition in grammatical typology, especially since acoustic analogues have been well-studied by phoneticians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grammatical number marking does not always match with the actual, conceptual numerosity of entities to which the word refers. This is the case in Finnish, which has multiple ways of expressing numerosity. In the chronometric number-decision task that we conducted, we used the following morphological stimulus types: singular, neutral (with a possessive suffix that neutralizes the grammatical number distinction) and plural nouns, with the following semantic (cognitive) types of numerosity expression: ordinary nouns, collective nouns, pluralia tantum, and idiomatic plural forms. The main finding is that all stimulus classes are positioned on a cline of numerosity between and (with ordinary singulars and plurals marking the two terminal points), although Finnish has only two grammatical number categories, singular, and plural. Moreover, it appears that subjects have an intuition about the frequency of use of singular and plural forms, even in the case where the words are presented in a morphologically neutralized form. This is seen especially in the cases where the referent of a test item was locally marked as ‘one’ or ‘two’, as in the body-part nouns ‘navel’- and ‘eye’-. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]