Search

The syntax of participial clauses has been an important issue in syntactic theory, especially since Perlmutter (1978) put forth the Unaccusative Hypothesis. This is the object of a lively debate, one of the most controversial aspects being whether unaccusativity effects are better explained in syntactic or semantic terms (cf. e.g. Sorace 2000). Focusing on Italian, this paper argues that participial clauses are subject to both syntactic and semantic constraints and that, contrary to the claims of semanticist approaches to unaccusativity (à la Van Valin 1990), the former take precedence over the latter. Demonstrably, an Aktionsart constraint requiring that the predicate involved be telic operates in a different fashion for the two classes of unaccusatives vs. unergatives. This fact, however, becomes clear only once a commonplace is refuted: Italian unergatives are not altogether ungrammatical in participial clauses, as currently assumed in the wake of Perlmutter (1989). They are so only within a syntactically defined subset thereof, that of noncontrolled participial constructions, while in the complementary subset of controlled participial clauses, occurrence of unergatives is syntactically allowed and semantically constrained. This indicates that the two constructions obey distinct syntactic conditions. Formalization of these, carried out in Relational Grammar, automatically solves a number of problems, within Italian and across Romance. Most notably, it affords a natural solution to the problem of the voice of Romance participial constructions. It also allows a proper understanding of the Romance facts under discussion against the background of a cross-linguistic typology of alignment systems.

In the early 2000s, the SADS, an extensive linguistic atlas project, surveyed more than three thousand individuals across German-speaking Switzerland on over two hundred linguistic variants, capturing the morphosyntactic variation in Swiss German. In this paper, we applied TESS, a Bayesian clustering method from evolutionary biology to the SADS to infer population structure, building on parallels between biology and linguistics that have recently been illustrated theoretically and explored experimentally. We tested three clustering models with different spatial assumptions: a nonspatial model, a spatial trend model with a spatial gradient, and a spatial full-trend model with both a spatial gradient and spatial-autocorrelation. Results reveal five distinct morphosyntactic populations, four of which correspond to traditional Swiss German dialect regions and one of which corresponds to a base population. Moreover, the spatial trend model outperforms the nonspatial model, suggesting a gradual transition of morphosyntax and supporting the idea of a Swiss Germandialect continuum.

We discovered several recurring errors in the current version of the Europarl Corpus originating both from the web site of the European Parliament and the corpus compilation based thereon. The most frequent error was incompletely extracted metadata leaving non textual fragments within the textual parts of the corpus files. This is on average the case for every second speaker change. We not only cleaned the Europarl Corpus by correcting several kinds of errors but also aligned the speakers’ contributions of all available languages and compiled every thing into a new XML structured corpus. This facilitates a more sophisticated selection of data e.g. querying the corpus for speeches by speakers of a particular polit ical group or in particular language combinations.

Recent years have seen an increased interest in and availability of parallel corpora. Large corpora from international organizations (e.g. European Union United Nations European Patent Office) or from multilingual Internet sites (e.g. OpenSubtitles) are now easily available and are used for statistical machine translation but also for online search by different user groups. This paper gives an overview of different usages and different types of search systems. In the past parallel corpus search systems were based on sentence aligned corpora. We argue that automatic word alignment allows for major innovations in searching parallel corpora. Some online query systems already employ word alignment for sorting translation variants but none supports the full query functionality that has been developed for parallel treebanks. We propose to develop such a system for efficiently searching large parallel corpora with a powerful query language.

This volume brings together thirteen papers on sound change dealing mostly with Romance in general, several Romance languages in particular (French, Italian, Rhaetoromance, Romanian, Spanish) and a few non-Romance languages as well (Basque, K?ichee?). Most papers are about the articulatory and acoustic causes of sound change and how spatiotemporal variation in production affects the perceptual identification of phonetic segments. Other relevant research topics are the relationship between phonetics and phonology and the influence of the speakers? age and provenance and of word frequency on the speed at which sound changes take place. The contributions of this volume report acoustic and/or articulatory data in support of particular explanatory interpretations which may inspire future work on diachronic phonology.