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In this article it is argued that the L-stem (stem III) in Quranic Arabic is a pluractional derivation of the G-stem (stem I) and that it expresses distributive participant plurality. With direct objects that refer to a plurality of nonvolitional entities, the verb form describes a plurality of situations conceptualized distributively among the objects. With direct objects that refer to volitional participants, the situations are typically conceptualized as inversely distributed between the subject participant and the object participant. When the verb form is used antipassively, the object participant is syntactically omitted but semantically implied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the distribution of the use of the accusative as an indirect object in two major dialect groups of Modern Greek, namely Northern Greek and Pontic Greek. The loss of the dative in Medieval Greek (c. 10th c. AD) resulted in the use of the genitive as an indirect object in the southern varieties and of the accusative in Northern Greek and Asia Minor Greek. As Standard Modern Greek employs the genitive, little attention has been paid to the distribution of the accusative, and our study was aimed to fill that gap by presenting data collected in Northern Greece from speakers of both dialect groups. According to our findings, the accusative is exclusively used in all syntactic domains inherited from the Ancient Greek dative in both dialect groups, but the two groups are kept apart in terms of the obligatoriness vs. optionality or lack of clitic doubling and availability vs. lack of "high" positions, e.g., for external possessors and ethical dative constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite Grewendorf's well-known German binding data with the double-object verb zeigen 'show', where one object reflexively binds the other and which suggests that the direct object (DO) is generated higher than the indirect object (IO), this paper argues for the canonical surface order of IO > DO as base order. We highlight the exceptional status of Grewendorf's examples, build on scope facts as well as a quantitative acceptability rating study, and exploit the fact that zeigen can also be used as inherently reflexive with idiomatic meaning. Appealing to the base configuration of the pieces of idiomatic expressions and considering different Spell-Out possibilities of coreferential objects in German, we show that the case, number, and gender underspecification of the anaphor sich poses a previously unnoticed problem for derivational approaches to binding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the syntactic dimension of ditransitive verbs in terms of the universal theory of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG). This theory is syntactic in nature, but it also covers the semantic as well as the pragmatic aspects of any linguistic phenomenon. It assumes a universal framework through which syntactic constructions can be analyzed. However, the morphological structure that each language enjoys renders the universal treatment more complicated and can question the universal nature of such a theory. In this paper, an attempt is made to check if the universal tenet of the theory is maintained over two typologically different languages: English and Arabic in respect of the way that double-object constructions (DOCs) are represented in the theory. A limitation is made to answer these questions: does the rich morphological nature of Arabic affect the universality of RRG in so far as Layered Structure of the Clause (LSC) is concerned? and; where and how does the information about tense is represented in both languages? The results show that this theory is indeed universal when it deals with a syntactic phenomenon like DOCs and that a separate projection is dedicated to represent some related information about the clause and this is concluded from the analysis of the selected data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper explores Differential Object Marking in a variety of Asturian (Western Iberian Romance) spoken in western Asturias (northwestern Spain). This ancestral form of speech stands out from Central Asturian and especially from Standard Spanish. For a number of reasons, ranging from profound changes in pronunciation, vocabulary, morphology and information structure to slight but very relevant effects on syntax. The main goal of this study is to examine the special marking of direct objects in order to find out what triggers the distribution of Differential Object Marking in this variety. To this aim, this paper will examine, from a variationist perspective, the influence of a number of semantic and discourse-pragmatic parameters on the marking of direct objects in this Western Asturian language as well as in Standard Spanish 1 and Central Asturian (which is generally considered the normative variety of Asturian). The results obtained from this comparison will allow us to outline the differences between these three varieties in terms of object marking, shedding more light on the origin and function of Differential Object Marking in Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to provide an explanation of the emergence of DOM in peripheral Macedonian dialects through a reevaluation of the contact hypothesis. The southern and south-western dialects in the contact zones with Greek and Aromanian use a dative-based pattern to mark specific, predominantly human and animate referents. However, the contact hypothesis cannot fully explain the origin of DOM in the southernmost dialects because it overlooks the wider interlingual context within which this change occurred. Relying on the analysis of the examples from the oldest sources with DOM, the author argues in favor of a multifactorial explanation of its origin: contact obscured the case marking functions of clitics and provided an analytic direct object pattern. The introduction of na -marking on direct objects satisfied both the semantic and pragmatic requirements of a successful message by discriminating between the syntactic functions and discourse prominence of the object participant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution analyses the role French may have played as a model language in the development of the indirect passive (or recipient passive) in Middle English. It is based on diachronic corpus data showing that the construction appeared in Middle English predominantly with verbs borrowed from French and spread to native verbs only later. The fact that French did not have a recipient passive construction speaks against contact influence, whereas the data as well as the situation of close language contact between Old French and Middle English speak in favour of contact-induced change. The hypothesis of internal change will be contrasted with several explanations in a language contact scenario. The first one is syntactic and regards the type of dative case : English integrated the French structural dative into its native grammar, which so far only had an inherent dative. Passives with structural datives were prior to native constructions and may have triggered them. The transfer may have been facilitated by the reanalysis of certain bridge constructions (proclitics and clausal complements). The more conceptual second part discusses current psycholinguistic research in order to identify methods which help overcome the methodological deadlock that historical linguists are facing when they want to assess the validity of competing explanations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the historical development of the particle away in English. Assuming the three-layered VP structure proposed by Ramchand (2008), and the Inner Aspect proposed by Travis (1994, 2010), Fujita and Matsumoto (2005), and Ogawa and Niinuma (2013), I argue that there are three positions available for the particle away: the directional away is located in Res, which is the lowest in the VP structure, the completive aspectual away is in Asp(completive), which is above Proc, and the continuative or iterative aspectual away is in Asp(continuative or iterative), which is above Asp(completive). The data from Corpus of Historical American English show that the continuative or iterative aspectual away has been concatenated with the activity verbs earlier than accomplishment verbs, which is compatible with the syntactic analysis of grammaticalization proposed by Roberts and Roussou (2003). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paucal constructions represent a specific sub-area in the grammar of Russian in which a kind of morphosyntactic variation can be found that is unattested elsewhere in the language. This variation occurs in some animate paucal constructions especially when these are in the direct object function. In this position, these constructions can be assigned either the genitive-accusative case (that is, the animate form), as would be expected given their semantics, or, alternatively, the nominative-accusative case, as with inanimate paucal constructions. This paper explores several aspects of this variability, focusing mainly on the statistical correlations of the competing forms, their implications for the Animacy Hierarchy, and their diachronic evolution. The evidence at hand points to the interaction of semantic (animacy, individuation, modality) and formal (gender, inflectional class) factors on the selection of one or the other form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous literature contains two different points of view regarding the subjectobject asymmetry related to the DP head of pseudorelatives (PRs). Some authors claim that the DP head can only be interpreted as the subject of the embedded predicate (subject-gap PRs). Other authors point towards the possibility of finding other constituents (e.g. direct object) in head position (object-gap PR), too. In this paper I claim that there are certain languages that only allow the DP head to be the subject of the embedded predicate, that is, they only allow subject-gap PRs, whereas other languages allow both subject-gap and object-gap PRs. Thus, the aim of this paper is to present the object-gap PR generalization to account for the cross-linguistic availability of subject-gap and object-gap PRs: the availability of object-gap PRs is subject to object clitic doubling. The structure of this paper goes as follows. Section 1 introduces PRs. Section 2 presents data about subject-gap and object-gap PRs. Section 3 gives some remarks on object clitic doubling. Section 4 presents the object-gap PR generalization. Conclusions and further research issues are presented in section 5. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Domínios de Lingu@gem is the property of Dominios de Lingu@gem 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.)

In Russian negative sentences the verb’s direct object may appear either in the accusative case, which is licensed by the verb (as is common cross-linguistically), or in the genitive case, which is licensed by the negation (Russian-specific “genitive-of-negation” phenomenon). Such sentences were used to investigate whether case marking is employed for anticipating syntactic structure, and whether lexical heads other than the verb can be predicted on the basis of a case-marked noun phrase. Experiment 1, a completion task, confirmed that genitive-of-negation is part of Russian speakers’ active grammatical repertoire. In Experiments 2 and 3, the genitive/accusative case manipulation on the preverbal object led to shorter reading times at the negation and verb in the genitive versus accusative condition. Furthermore, Experiment 3 manipulated linear order of the direct object and the negated verb in order to distinguish whether the abovementioned facilitatory effect was predictive or integrative in nature, and concluded that the parser actively predicts a verb and (otherwise optional) negation on the basis of a preceding genitive-marked object. Similarly to a head-final language, case-marking information on preverbal noun phrases (NPs) is used by the parser to enable incremental structure building in a free-word-order language such as Russian. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We present evidence for the influence of semantics on the order of subject, object, and verb in Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) sentences. While some have argued for a prevailing pattern of SVO in Libras, we find a strong tendency for this order in sentences that do not presuppose the existence of the verb's object, but not in sentences that do, which instead favor SOV. These findings are coherent with those of a recent study on gesture. We argue that the variable influence of the relevant predicates is particularly salient in sign languages, due to the iconic nature of the visual modality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of the structure of relative clauses with an indirect object or adjunct gap in two Mundaka Basque varieties (Mundaka Basque I and Mundaka Basque II). In Mundaka Basque I, relativization of indirect objects and adjuncts is grammatical when the relative clause is in subject or direct object position, while in Mundaka Basque II this same syntactic configuration is ungrammatical. This variation is explained by a difference in the status of P. In Mundaka Basque I the P has unvalued φ-features, whereas in Mundaka Basque II the P has no unvalued φ-features. Evidence for this comes from PP extraction out of [-Q] embedded clauses: the intermediate v gets its φ-features valued by the P of the extracted phrase in Mundaka Basque I, while it does not in Mundaka Basque II. Additionally, this study shows that the Case matching effect is not a syntactic constraint but rather a morphological constraint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the principles of economy, scrambled orders require an interpretive license. Removal of such a license should result in canonical orders, that is, orders I hypothesize to be determined by a thematic hierarchy. It is traditionally assumed that the interpretive license for scrambling is provided by information-structural interpretations such as focus and background. However, either direct object-indirect object or indirect object-direct object order is possible in Russian all-focus constructions, complicating the choice of order analyzed as canonical. I argue that Russian scrambling can be licensed by a variety of interpretations, focus/background encoding being but one of them. When the construal of objects is neutralized on the basis of all of the relevant interpretations, the direct object-indirect object order surfaces, strongly suggesting that this is the canonical order of Russian objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the complexity of Direct Object Scrambling (DOS) by testing this phenomenon experimentally in three Dutch-speaking groups of children between the ages of 6 and 14: SLI, HFA, and TD (Specific Language Impairment, High Functioning Autism, and Typically Developing). First, the results show that, despite the failure to scramble in both pathological groups, the children with HFA do not display any morpho-syntactic deficits, whereas the children with SLI do. This suggests that the children with SLI and the children with HFA fail to scramble for different reasons. It is argued that children with SLI do this because of a problem with syntactic object placement, whereas children with HFA leave referential direct objects unscrambled because they fail to consistently integrate the different components of DOS. These results from two different pathological groups uncover different components in the complex phenomenon of DOS, at the interface of grammar (including (morpho-)syntax and semantics) and pragmatics: syntactic object placement, definiteness/referentiality, speaker/hearer beliefs, and information structure. Earlier work on DOS in younger, TD Dutch-acquiring children identifies another component of DOS, namely the pragmatic knowledge that speaker and hearer are always independent (Concept of Non-Shared Assumptions, Schaeffer, 2000). As such, the current study demonstrates the important contribution of acquisition research in TD as well as pathological populations to the unravelling and understanding of complex linguistic phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims and research questions: This paper presents a new study addressing the issue of cross-linguistic influence in acquisition of referring expressions. The main research question is how to predict directionality of this influence in a dual language development. Methodology: The method is an elicited production task. We consider the phenomenon of direct object referring choices, i.e. noun, pronoun and null element, in a ‘null-object’–‘overt-object’ language pair (Ukrainian and English). Data and Analysis: Participants of the experiment are 4–6-year-old Ukrainian–English bilinguals (N20) and Ukrainian monolinguals (N21). The data are analyzed in the statistical program R, utilizing the R-library function lme4. The results are presented as odds ratios (ORs) of each direct object type. Findings: Our data reveal that while there is no significant difference in Ukrainian object types in most of the age groups, there is a considerable amount of null object usage in English at the ages of four to five. Originality: The innovative nature of this study lies in: (i) the consideration of a licit object omission at a later stage of language development (from 4 to 6 years of age); (ii) the examination of an under-investigated language combination (i.e. English and Ukrainian); and (iii) the innovative approach to linguistic data analysis (e.g. comparing OR values). Implications: Our findings suggest that the directionality of influence in dual language acquisition depends on the developmental stage, language-specific means of syntax–pragmatics interaction, and extra-linguistic input-related factors. At the early stages of development, the null-object language is likely to influence the overt-object language, especially under conditions of limited exposure to the latter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a brief overview and comparison of the imperfective and perfective aspect in Estonian and Latvian. The main means of expressing the perfective and imperfective aspect in Estonian are the case opposition of the direct object (the nominative/genitive or the partitive), the use of verb particles, and the general context. In Latvian, the opposition of the perfective and imperfective aspect is mainly expressed by existence or absence of verb prefixes, adverbs, and also the context. In Latvian, verb prefixes, besides perfectivity, may also add or modify the lexical meaning of the verb. We compare how the perfective and imperfective aspect are expressed in both languages in the case of transitive verbs, based on the correspondences found in a text corpus of literary works and their translations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about several little-known Latin funerary formulae of some interest. It is also intended as an addition to the growing literature on what are now called in English ‘support verbs’, with special focus on facio. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper aims to clarify the relationship between the superficially similar direct object markers attested in Modern South Arabian, Ge'ez, Arabic, Aramaic, Samalian, Hebrew, and Phoenician. I argue that the direct object markers in Aramaic and the Canaanite languages derive from a single innovative form, which I reconstruct as *ʾayāt-. I further claim that the remaining forms are unrelated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the use of subjective and objective nouns and noun phrases in discourse using the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus. It expands upon an earlier study, where I showed that subjective adjectival premodifiers are typically used with the indefinite article in corpus data (e. g. an interesting conclusion), and that further modification (e. g. a very interesting conclusion) results in an even higher likelihood of indefinite marking (Vartiainen 2013, Subjectivity, indefiniteness and semantic change. English Language and Linguistics 17(1). 157-179). In this paper, I focus on three research questions: (i) does the correlation between subjective meaning and indefinite marking also obtain when demonstrative and possessive determiners are included in the data, (ii) does the correlation depend on adjectival modification, or are subjective nouns also used more often in indefinite structures, (iii) are there qualitative differences (in terms of syntactic roles) between the use of indefinite subjective and objective NPs? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies show that Direct Object Scrambling (DOS) is impaired in Dutch-speaking children with High-Functioning Autism (HFA). However, as DOS can be considered a syntax-pragmatics interface phenomenon, it is unclear whether DOS errors are due to impaired syntax or impaired pragmatics. In order to shed light on this question, the current study investigates Object Relative Clauses (ORC), assumed to involve syntactic object placement (as in DOS), but not pragmatics, in children with HFA. We examine the elicited production, comprehension and judgment of ORCs in 25 Dutch-speaking children with HFA (age 6-14) and 25 TD matches with comparable non-verbal reasoning scores. Results reveal no differences between groups, but show that, similar to TD children (and adults), children with HFA use passives and animacy to disambiguate ORCs. The TD-HFA similarity indicates that the syntactic part of DOS is unimpaired in children with HFA and suggests problems with the pragmatic part. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new hypothesis for the distribution of nasalized and non-nasalized preterites in Lycian is proposed. This hypothesis allows us to trace, in a straightforward way, the appearance of the nasalized preterites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the distribution of a phonetically null pronoun and the clitic lo referring to a proposition as the direct object (DO) of cognition and communication verbs in Spanish. The use of this null object referring to propositions is found cross-dialectally in Spanish, and this paper argues that the completeness of the proposition constrains in crucial ways the distribution of these two propositional anaphors. The analysis of five different cases in which the DO pronoun refers to an incomplete proposition illustrates that the null object is the anaphor preferred when the proposition being referred to is incomplete, whereas the propositional pronoun lo is preferred to refer to complete propositions. Completeness of the proposition - defined here as a gradient feature and not a binary distinction - is discussed in relation to the notion of saliency or accessibility of the referent and the data analyzed in this article for propositional anaphora is discussed in relation to NP anaphora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates negative structure in Japanese. The scope of Japanese negation appears to be narrower than that of English, which has led to different treatment of Japanese and English negation in the literature. I propose an analysis that maintains the same negative structure for Japanese and English. I demonstrate that all the scope facts regarding negative sentences in Japanese can be accounted for if we assume obligatory object movement into the TP-domain in Japanese, that is, the difference between Japanese and English is not the structural position of negation but the existence of this obligatory object movement in Japanese. The analysis also involves a discussion of scopal properties of certain elements such as focused or disjunctive phrases, which play a crucial role to determine the position of objects. Then I argue that the obligatory object movement in Japanese is driven by the need for accusative Case-particle licensing, on the basis of the observation that objects without a Case-particle are generally immobile in Japanese. I show that this analysis leads to a new perspective on A-scrambling in Japanese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses three variable coding properties of Spanish objects: flagging ( a-marking vs. ø-marking), indexing (clitic doubling vs. no doubling), and clitic case form (accusative lo vs. dative le). These properties are essential for the formal identification of grammatical relations. They are triggered by similar parameters that partly overlap and partly show distinct distributions, yet they also challenge the boundaries between direct objects [DO] and indirect objects [IO] and raise the question whether the typological alignment of Spanish (di)transitive clauses is indirective or secundative. The study draws on quantitative and qualitative corpus data on formal, semantic, and discourse properties of core participants in Spanish clauses, relating these properties to the distribution of variable coding. It is concluded that a-marking, clitic doubling, and leísmo are less frequently employed than unmarked objects, no doubling, and accusative case for clitics, that Spanish DO and IO must be taken as extreme points of a more general Object syntactic function, and that, in general, all variable object coding follows an indirective alignment type. Consequently, animate and topical objects are considered as formally and functionally marked atypical objects both in monotransitive and ditransitive clauses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A model of syntactic development proposes that children's very first word-combinations are already generated via productive rules that express in syntactic form the relation between a predicate word and its semantic argument. An alternative hypothesis is that they learn frozen chunks. In Study 1 we analyzed a large sample of young children's early two-word sentences comprising of verbs with direct objects. A majority of objects were generated by pronouns but a third of children's sentences used bare common nouns as objects. We checked parents' twoword long sentences of verbs with objects and found almost no bare common nouns. Children cannot have copied sentences with bare noun objects from parents' two-word long sentences as frozen chunks. In Study 2 we raised the possibility that children's early sentences with bare nouns are rote-learned 'telegraphic speech', acquired as unanalyzed frozen chunks from longer input sentences due to perceptual problem to hear the unstressed determiners. To test this explanation, we tested the children's speech corpus for evidence that they avoid determiners in their word-combinations. The results showed that they do not; in fact they generate very many determiner-common noun combinations as two-word utterances. The findings suggest that children produce their early word-combinations of the core-grammar type by a productive rule that maps the predicate-argument relations of verbs and their semantic arguments to headdependent syntax, and not as frozen word-combinations. Children mostly learn to use indexical expressions such as pronouns to express the variable semantic arguments of verbs as context dependent; they also employ bare common nouns to express specific values of the arguments. The earliest word-combinations demonstrate that children understand that syntax is built on the predicate-argument relations of words and use this insight to produce their early sentences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We utilize variationist methodology to explore the conventionalization and pragmatics of 3rd person direct object clitic placement in Spanish periphrastic constructions. Analysis of 652 tokens extracted from three Mexico City speech corpora indicates that while proclitic position is the majority variant, the rate of enclitic position depends on particular [finite + non-finite verb] constructions, distinguished by frequency measures and more grammaticalized meanings. At the same time, enclisis is favored by propositional or non-referential direct objects and by direct objects of low topic persistence, measured by subsequent mentions. In contrast, proclitic position is favored more by inanimate than human referents, especially those that show topic persistence and whose previous mention was in the syntactic role of direct object in the same or preceding clause. These quantitative patterns suggest that proclisis indicates prototypical DOs in non-prototypical use, i.e. topical inanimates. Thus, despite conventionalization of the general proclitic schema, particular constructions and semanticpragmatic considerations are operative factors in the variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Object indexation is a grammatical phenomenon in which a clitic pronoun, co-referential with the free nominal object, appends to the verb. Optionality of indexation in Persian leads us to consider the role of pragmatic factors in its occurring. The present study aims at investigating the influence of information structure on direct object indexation in Persian. To do this, the data of standard spoken Persian including 540 cases were extracted from various resources and then analyzed within the framework of Role and Reference Grammar. The high frequency of topical direct object indexation confirms the role of information structure in direct object indexation. Analyzing the few cases of focal direct object indexation indicated that all cases of both topical and focal object indexation necessarily involve identifiable referents. Hence, the basic requirement in direct object indexation in Persian is identifiability of its referent. Considering the syntactic position of direct object in Persian clauses shows strong overlap of topical and focal objects. The post-core slot only belongs to the topical direct object and focal object cannot be placed there. Therefore, in order to identify the pragmatic relations of direct object in a clause, considering the context of the discourse is highly important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines two different strategies found in direct object encoding on the basis of a sample of 159 languages. In particular, this paper deals with the differences between symmetric (i.e. the alternation between two or more overt markers) and asymmetric (i.e. the alternation between a zero and one of more overt markers) alternations. The investigation is aimed at determining whether there are any evident cross-linguistic regularities with respect to the factors involved in these two kinds of alternation. It will be argued that the difference in the formal realization of direct object encoding is related to the distinct functions that these two structures perform cross-linguistically.While asymmetric alternations are regulated by referential properties of the direct object referent, symmetric alternations are governed by parameters related to verbal semantics, such as affectedness and boundedness, polarity, and quantification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper aims at further investigating the relative degree of flexibility of constituent order in Greek, which has been classified as a free word order language (Tzartzanos 1946, 1963; Greenberg 1963; Philippaki-Warburton 1982, 1985, 1987; Lascaratou 1984, 1989, 1994, among others). In this study we present additional evidence in support of the view expressed in Lascaratou (1989, 1994, 1999) that, though very flexible, Greek word order is not completely free, but rather it is the result of tension between competing forces determining linear arrangements. Focusing on the analysis of various VP structures drawn from the Hellenic National Corpus (HNC)", we observe that no single (syntactic and/or lexical/semantic) factor appears to override the others in a salient manner, the relative strength of each individual factor not always being clearly and reliably measurable. In particular, it seems that constituent length does not constitute a more important factor than the syntactic and/or lexical/semantic relations holding between elements in the Greek VP. What is more, with respect to the concept of "adjacency" put forward by Hawkins (2001, 2004) to interpret the preference for certain linearization patterns vs. others, we propose that constituent length essentially operates in a substantially different way and direction than syntactic and/or lexical/semantic dependency relations. More specifically, while-for parsing efficiency-constituent length may often be responsible for the postposition of heavy constituents thus resulting in the disruption of adjacency by separating elements which "belong together", syntactic and/or lexical/semantic relations, on the other hand, intrinsically motivate the adjacency of elements which "belong together", thus resisting any rearrangement that would bring them apart. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrary to recent work in Distributed Morphology adopting Early Root Insertion (the notion that Roots are present from the outset of the syntactic derivation), we argue that Late Insertion applies to Roots just like other morphemes. We support this conclusion with empirical evidence (Root suppletion and hyponymous direct objects in noun incorporation and related constructions) and conceptual considerations (including the beneficial obviation of readjustment operations and the possibility that narrow syntax is universal). Additional data (Latin semideponent verbs) allow us to recast Embick's (2000) licensing analysis of Latin deponent verbs as a further argument for Late Root Insertion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

L’étude porte sur les compléments en à et de placés à l'initiale d'un énoncé comportant une inversion du sujet nominal. Elle vise à comprendre pourquoi ces compléments sont parfois détachés à l'aide d'une virgule. L'observation de corpus textuels conduit à considérer que la présence ou l'absence de virgule signale deux constructions distinctes: dans la perspective théorique des approches macro-syntaxiques de l’énoncé en termes de ‘noyau’ / ‘affixes’, le complément initial suivi d'une virgule est analysé comme un préfixe détaché co-indexé au terme (vide) de départ du noyau, alors que dans la construction sans virgule le complément initial est intégré au noyau dont il occupe la première position. A cette différence syntaxique correspond une différence dans le mode de structuration informationnelle de l’énoncé (proposition catégorique ayant le complément pour thème et le noyau pour rhème et/ou focus vs. proposition thétique), qui elle-même induit deux types différents de stratégies discursives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on language production and comprehension. It discusses the language development of Amelioration Hypothesis (AH) and Universal Grammar (UG) from general cognitive mechanisms. It tackles the use of language and its acquisition as well as the direct object clitics in Romanian languages.

So far, most analyses assume that DOM and clitic doubling (CD) are two sides of the same mechanism, arising from a structure-dependent condition (i.e. Case for nouns). This assumption concerns Romance languages in general, including Romanian (old or modern). This paper points out that data from Early Modern Romanian (EMR) and data from other Balkan Romance languages contradict this assumption. The analysis I propose disengages DOM from CD and from structure-dependent constraints, and brings evidence for a discourse-based approach to both DOM and CD, separately or in conjunction with each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report the results of two studies that investigate the factors contributing to non-native-like ability in child and adult heritage speakers by focusing on oral production of Differential Object Marking (DOM), the overt morphological marking of animate direct objects in Spanish. In study 1, 39 school-age bilingual children (ages 6–17) from the United States and 20 monolingual children from Mexico completed a Story Retelling Task and a Picture Description Task. In study 2, 64 young adult heritage speakers (ages 18–25), 23 adult immigrants to the United States (ages 40–60), and 40 native speakers from Mexico (ages 18–60) completed the same oral tasks. Results showed significant rates of omission of DOM in animate direct objects in all the experimental groups from the United States and ceiling performance in the groups from Mexico (both children and adults). We discuss how the combined effects of reduced input, potential attrition in the first generation of immigrants, incomplete acquisition in the second generation, and transfer from English may account for the persistent patterns of DOM omission with animate and specific direct objects in child and adult Spanish heritage speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Diachronica 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.)

Abstract: The article investigates the grammaticalization of the have perfect in Dutch by means of a corpus study of historical legal texts dating from the middle of the thirteenth century until the end of the eighteenth century. The focus of the investigation is on the gradual extension of the have +past participle construction in contexts that were not attested before. The study of the status of the subject, the direct object and the past participle in the corpus shows that the construction is increasingly used in a wider array of contexts. Moreover, the corpus search indicates that meaning components of the have +past participle construction are lost in the process of contextual extension. More specifically, the construction is increasingly used in the background of the discourse in order to expand on events that happened before the time of reference. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

It is relatively common in Spanish to find the singular indirect object pronoun le even when the corresponding noun phrase is plural and one would therefore expect the use of les. While it is true that various grammarians have described this phenomenon, the attention paid to matter by linguists in quantitative research has been sparse, particularly regarding the written word. The current study investigates and documents the use of le for les in written Spanish through a systematic analysis of newspaper articles in 11 cities of the Spanish-speaking world. The newspaper pieces analysed have not only made it possible to determine which cities display the highest frequency of this use of le, and if it is thus possible to assign it regional dialectal patterns, but they have also aided in resolving conflicting viewpoints in the literature about the use of this singular pronoun. These includes, for example, whether le for les is mainly a spoken feature that is not normally seen in writing; whether it is something used by people with little formal schooling but not by those with a strong educational background; and if it is utilized more in connection with people or with inanimate objects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There is an on-going debate amongst linguists regarding the status of the object marker (OM). Some scholars argue that OMs are agreement morphology (Baker 2010, Riedel 2009) while others argue that OMs are pronominal and not agreement morphology (Nevins 2010, Kramer, under review, Labelle 2007, Demuth & Johnson 1990, Mchombo 2002). The purpose of this paper is to contribute to this debate using data from Ikalanga to support the view that OMs are pronominal clitics. I discuss evidence in favor of the agreement analysis as well as that in favor of the pronominal analysis. OMs in Ikalanga behave like agreement morphology in that they attach only to the verbal stem, only one OM occurs in a clause, and they share grammatical features (person, gender and number) with the lexical NP with which they co-refer. However, there are many ways in which OMs behave like pronominals. For example, OMs do not vary in form according to the mood of a sentence or negation while subject markers, which I analyze as agreement morphemes do. They are not obligatory in Ikalanga sentences while subject markers are. OMs are not subject to locality constraints while agreement is. They can be bound by the subject (backward pronominalization), something unexpected of agreement and there is ample evidence to show that the lexical NP with which the OM co-refers is an adjunct, a fact which has been used in the literature to argue that the OM is pronominal in such a set up. The evidence in favor of the pronominal analysis however, is more compelling and therefore I conclude that OMs are pronominal clitics and not agreement morphology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In Spanish verbs associated with three participants - Agent, Theme and Recipient - may appear in alternating constructions, where the 3rd person recipient argument is realized as a prepositional phrase (PP) (Pedro envió una carta a María 'Peter sent a letter to Mary') or as one doubled by a clitic (Pedro le envió una carta a María 'Pedro sent Mary a letter'), the latter being referred to as an indirect object (IO). This paper provides a corpus-based study of the distributional patterns of the two constructions that includes both give-type and send-type verbs. The analysis of PPs and IOs in terms of referential properties shows that both have a strong tendency to be [+definite]. However, the distribution of the IO is more constrained than the PPs in terms of certain referential properties, although there are some lexical differences observed among the verbs. The PP, on the other hand, is free of any restrictions. One important contribution of this study is that it provides empirical evidence that the IO associated with the role of Recipient behaves very differently from the one assuming other roles: clitic doubling, which has become the norm for the latter, is still very restricted for the former, contrary to what has been commonly assumed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Different meanings of a verb are associated with different argument structures (subcategorization), which in this study are sentential complements (SC) and direct object (DO) arguments. Interaction between verbal meaning and argument structure is investigated at the production level using polysemous verbs in the absence (Norming Experiment) and presence of sense-promoting context (Main Experiment) with participants that are university students and teachers of English. Next, the main experiment is replicated in the participants'' native language to look for L1 effects on results. Speakers of English as L2, whether students or teachers, were found to be capable of making sense-contingent verb subcategorization distinctions between DO and SC arguments following priming context, with DO context making the stronger contribution to DO-biased verb meanings. Unlike native speakers of English, non-native participants showed a greater tendency to use SC arguments irrespective of verb bias requirement and priming context. When the study was replicated in the participants'' own language, native-like preferences for SC and DO subcategorization frames were observed, which led the researcher to conclude that the dominance of SC arguments and the underuse of DO arguments in participants'' L2 productions were not governed by influences from their L1. Discussion of the implications of these results is extended to language learning classroom contexts. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper presents the actor emphatic construction (AE) in Tahitian and offers an initial investigation of its basic syntactic structure. The AE is a construction found across the Eastern Polynesian languages; it is typically used to focus the agent (subject) of a transitive verb. In Tahitian, the AE appears in three different variants. In all of them, the focused agent occurs clause-initially in a prepositional phrase headed by nā. The three variants differ in their realization of the theme. In the first two, the theme, with or without the accusative case marker, appears after the transitive verb, which follows the agent phrase. In a third variant, the theme is preverbal, immediately following the focused agent. Our investigation shows the following: (1) the Tahitian AE is a biclausal structure; (2) the initial nā-phrase serves as the matrix predicate and the focused agent is part of that predicate; (3) the verb following it is part of a dependent clause; and (4) the theme is a direct object when it is postverbal, but it is the matrix subject when it is preverbal. We offer some preliminary considerations concerning the interpretation of the AE in Tahitian and its fine syntactic structure and compare our analysis to analyses of the better-studied Māori AE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of utterances such as This is to count as a construction. It is argued that a construction is required to capture certain semi-idiosyncratic aspects of the pattern. We call this construction the is-to construction. At the same time, its properties are motivated by relating the construction to other well-known constructions via a default inheritance hierarchy. The article also discusses a nonproductive “object-related” construction and suggests a diachronic relationship between the two. The proposal is contrasted with word-based, semantic, and purely syntactic accounts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Scandinavian languages, sentential negation must be licensed in Spec–head relation in the IP-domain, necessitating leftward movement of negative objects, Negative Shift (NegS). While string-vacuous NegS is possible in all Scandinavian varieties, there is a fair amount of cross-linguistic variation in non-string-vacuous NegS. In particular, the varieties contrast in which constituents can be crossed by NegS and whether or not crossing of a certain constituent requires the presence of an intervening verb. The paper presents the complex variation as to the distribution of negative objects in Scandinavian, using data from different sources, and outlines an analysis within Fox & Pesetsky's (2003, 2005a, b) cyclic linearization model, which accounts for this variation by differences in the availability of the intermediate positions non-string-vacuous movement is forced to proceed through. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Yurakaré (unclassified, central Bolivia) marks core arguments on the verb by means of pronominal affixes. Subjects are suffixed, objects are prefixed. There are six types of head-marked objects in Yurakaré, each with its own morphosyntactic and semantic properties. Distributional patterns suggest that the six objects can be divided into two larger groups reminiscent of the typologically recognized direct vs. indirect object distinction. This paper looks at the interaction of this complex system of participant marking and verbal semantics. By investigating the participant-marking patterns of nine verb classes (four representing a gradual decrease of patienthood of the P participant, five a gradual decrease of agentivity of the A participant), I come to the conclusion that grammatical roles in Yurakaré can be defined semantically, and case frames are to a high degree determined by verbal semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our study analyses the manner of conceptualising and of describing the secondary object (SO) in the latest treatise of Romanian Grammar (GALR 2005, 2008). To that effect, the five criteria presented by the academic treatise for the purpose of differentiating the SO from the direct object (DO) are considered both from the perspective of their consistency and from the perspective of the current tendencies in the dynamics of the Romanian language. With respect to consistency, the last three of the five criteria advanced by the GALR -- the impossibility of coordination between the SO and the DO, the existence of a different grid of thematic roles and the incompatibility between the SO and the indirect object (IO) -- are discarded as non-conclusive in the process of carrying out an efficient separation between the SO and the DO. Furthermore, we note the fact that, from the list of the 12 ditransitive verbs provided by the GALR (to announce, to listen, to convince, to teach, to examine, to inform, to learn, to ask, to advise, to state, to traverse and to pass), some have lost this trait in the current stage of evolution of the Romanian language. On the other hand, when the SO indicates an object co-referential to a 3rd person singular feminine clitic, in the common use of the Romanian language one can observe the tendency of constructing the SO with pe and, therefore, of substituting/ doubling it by the corresponding clitic (o), which results in these properties no longer functioning as distinctive traits of the DO in relation to the SO. In conclusion, none of the five criteria suggested by the GALR works as a diagnostic test in order to dissociate between the two functions (DO and SO). However, we think that this fact should not lead to the elimination of the SO function from the Romanian grammar, but merely to a more rigorous formalisation of the thematic roles characteristic to the SO and the DO. In our opinion, only such an operation shall be able to support a criterion which should be sufficiently solid to differentiate between the two syntactic functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses syntactic and semantic aspects of direct object scrambling in Ukrainian. Given the complex nature of scrambling, the investigation is narrowed to only one of its types: the change SVO→SOV, defined as Middle Object Scrambling (MOS). This strategy affords a detailed examination of this phenomenon at a micro-level. MOS is scrutinized with regard to its syntactic aspects (e.g., position of a moved element) and semantic properties (e.g., possible interpretations of a direct object). The semantic features of definiteness, referentiality, and partitivity are particularly emphasized, as previous studies have claimed they play an important role in the process. This research demonstrates that the most relevant feature in Ukrainian MOS is specificity in the sense of partitivity/presuppositionality. The implication of this is that Slavic data provide further support for the universality of interpretational properties of the vP edge, in line with Chomsky 2001. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]